By Linda Stamato
Bacon, pork and earmark — they’re disarmingly simple terms, give cover to bad public policy. They refer to federal funds, awarded outside ordinary budget processes, directed to favored projects in home districts by influential members of Congress. Without committee hearings or other forms of public scrutiny, and, with no regard for merit or need, they are inserted in appropriation bills in defiance of good governing, adding to the cost and lowering the public’s trust in government.
The practice of earmarking ended in 2011, an action driven by public outrage, growing resistance in Congress and the huge costs and publicized scandals involving wasteful projects that generated notoriety including a bridge, in Alaska that went “nowhere.”
Taxpayers for Common Sense estimated the cost for earmarks, in 2010 alone, at $11 billion, and that was after so-called reforms had been adopted.
Now, with only a slim majority in the House and an evenly divided Senate, and no end in sight for the filibuster, pundits, policy wonks and even the editors of the New York Times are calling for a return to earmarking.
The move should be roundly rejected.
When public faith and trust in government are at all-time lows, why make matters worse by endorsing a return to pork, a practice that, even in its endorsement, the Times calls “organized bribery.”
With governing principles being seniority, influence and geography, not merit, and lacking vetting and genuine accountability, earmarks have been used as levers to hold up legislation, thus distorting priorities, even if, on occasion, they serve to “herd cats” to generate support for legislation deemed essential.
In the past earmarks have created problems for government agencies, bypassing their review and selection processes, and, often, the planning and programming processes of states that are the ostensible “beneficiaries.” Citizens Against Government Waste, among others, is vigorously opposed to the return of earmarks. It makes a convincing case in its Pig Book that, as it is, Congress constantly tries, through other means, to circumvent established budgetary processes. Yet, it’s a firmly entrenched practice in the “culture” of Congress.
Allowing earmarking to return with the blessing of Congress, though, ups the ante, opening all bills for attachment, thus risking more waste, fraud and corruption. Nevertheless, the pressure is on, and, on a bipartisan basis.
Indeed, after several requests by its members, the Congressional Research Service produced a report that provides insight into the current moratorium against earmarks and discusses how to seek their return.
Look at the not-so-distant past, to pre-moratorium days, to see why we should hesitate to permit their return:
- In March 2009, a $410 billion spending bill, packed with 9,286 earmarks costing $12.8 billion, became law. Since both parties love pork, it was a nonpartisan effort! Not lacking for humor, one of the earmarks, $1.8 million, was to conduct research on swine odor and manure management in Iowa!
A closer look reveals just how misguided it was. Earmarks made for certain hospitals, those in the districts of the sponsoring lawmakers, didn’t reflect an analysis of hospital needs for states as a whole and they didn’t originate from requests from the Department of Health and Human Services. Other hospitals, having greater need, but lacking political heft, gained nothing at all.
Also curious were earmarks for a variety of emergency management and security projects despite the fact that vast sums in Homeland Security Funds remained unspent. There were agricultural support efforts, land acquisitions, and funds for cleaning up brownfield sites, defensible choices, perhaps, but why didn’t they originate in the budget recommendations submitted by the Department of Agriculture or the Environmental Protection Agency? The agencies had other priorities, no doubt.
Congress could not control its yen for pork despite the catastrophic fiscal situation facing the nation at the time.
There were 2,200 items designating more than one billion dollars for specific hospitals and clinics, schools and colleges, museums, and service agencies all directly related to the fact that their sponsors serve on the Senate and House Appropriations Committees or hold leadership positions that allowed them to exercise that kind of influence.
There was no process for coordinating earmarks with agency programs, moreover, and there was no means to assess earmark effectiveness and no accountability for the funds they provided.
- The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 provides another shocking example. Initially, members of the House who had voted against the $700 billion bailout/rescue/investment bill, calling it a ‘sell out’ to the rich and the banks, and asserting that it didn’t provide sufficient relief to homeowners facing foreclosure, and so on. Once the Senate added pork, though, the dissidents turned around and voted for it. The Senate bill, loaded with lard, passed unchanged in the House by a vote of 263 to 171.
If the bill was bad, how could pork make it better? Indeed, it was not that the bill contained elements to which members of Congress really objected but that some of them were engaging in a holding action, that is, they were refusing to support it to ensure that their own pig got into the bill.
The bill also allowed, by earmark, residents of states that don’t pay income tax to deduct, from their federal taxes, sales tax paid over the course of the year. Texas, Nevada, Florida, Washington and Wyoming benefited, at a cost to the rest of us at about $3.3 billion.
This happened while responsible people, despite their serious policy differences, were demanding action on a measure deemed essential to the nation’s welfare. It happened while experts were talking about avoiding a depression, salvaging a collapsing economy, and avoiding significant damage to “Main Street.” It was therefore hard for some to grasp the idea that members of the nation’s Congress would hold the nation hostage, to allow the stock market to implode and for credit to vanish, while it fiddled and waited for its final meal — its pork — to be served up.
In the end, bi-partisan action from the Senate and the House, instead of illustrating legislative action at its best, illustrated how low we’d sunk. Pork proved to be king.
As an approach to federal spending practice, earmarking is fundamentally unsound. We need appropriate, defensible, and accountable financing for all budgetary appropriations.
While there have been earnest efforts to reform the process in the past, there really is no way to make earmarking work constructively. A current proposal, for example, would limit annual pork spending to $13 billion and require sponsors to be identified. Nothing doing. The potential for corruption is simply too great. The distortion of priorities would remain, the absence of competition would still undercut quality and, to be sure, influence would still substitute for merit.
The latest moves to “transform” earmarks, to “improve” them to minimize their most egregious features simply mask reality. Making a bad idea better, in short, doesn’t make it a good idea. And doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is a joke.
Let us hope that President Biden, in his need to double-down on his determination to effectuate policy through Congressional bipartisanship, doesn’t endorse the return of earmarks to get there.
Linda Stamato is the director emerita of the Center for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
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