In the presidential campaign you have heard and will hear the word "earmark" used a lot -- always in a negative way. And yet just about all of us have benefited in some way from our elected officials earmarking federal dollars to build something near us.
Sen. Barack Obama now says he opposes earmarks but he has not always felt that way. Sen. John McCain has loudly opposed earmarks and makes them a centerpiece issue.
What is an earmark?An earmark is a budget line that members of Congress insert. That "earmark" allows the spending to bypass normal competitive bidding or committee review. That is why so many seemingly nonsensical projects get paid for by earmarking. If the Congresswoman or Senator likes the idea, the project gets funded.
In fiscal year 2008, there were 11,524 earmarks totaling $16,501,833,000 for appropriations accounts.
The Office of Management and Budget says:
Earmarks are funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to properly manage funds. Congress includes earmarks in
appropriation bills -- the annual spending bills that Congress enacts to allocate discretionary spending -- and also in
authorization bills.
Where does the money go?You can see right here:
The watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste's Web site provides resources for journalists to investigate earmarking:
The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW's annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A "pork" project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.
Some of the biggest earmarks are for
military testing of all sorts. Many of those requests are still pending.
See how difficult it has been to get rid of earmarks and make all spending go through committee and review.
How about the candidates? Do they earmark?Obama
has been critical of Gov. Sarah Palin's backing of the earmark spending on the $398 million so-called "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska before she was elected. But Obama himself has earmarked more than 100 projects in 2008 alone.
Click here to see some of them.
The Republicans list even more Obama-backed earmarks.
Sen. Joe Biden has used earmark requests as well.
Click here to see eight earmarks for $3 million in just the Senate's Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education budget this year.
McCain has been one of the loudest critics of earmarks. He does not ask for earmarked spending for his state and wants to abolish the practice. He says he would, "Veto every bill with earmarks" that came across his desk.
In January, McCain said:
In 24 years as a member of Congress, I have never asked for nor received a single earmark or pork barrel project for my state.
I never will, and my state is doing fine. I'm going to make these other guys famous, and I'm going to have them imitate my record. So let me say again, fair warning, fair warning, I will veto every single pork-barrel-earmark-project-laden bill that comes across my desk as president of the United States. You will know their names. I will make them famous and I will stop it.
Let me finally put it into you in the right terms for you that are better understandable, because it raises interest rates. It makes you pay more for your home loan mortgage. It makes you pay more in payments for your automobile. It costs you more when you go to the store.
My friend, Phil Gramm, as I told you, is one of the world's most renown economists said that in the last two years, the pork barrel spending in those two years, some $35 billion, would have meant that every child in America would have received a tax credit of $1,000.
Now, which would you rather do? Have a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, a $233 million bridge to an island with 50 people on it or $1,000 tax credit for every child in America? Which would you rather have? I know what you'd rather have.
But Democrats whack him for backing a spending bill to Israel, which, technically is an earmark. (See more about that below.)
Still, McCain is loudly against earmarks.
Here is a 2006 story in which McCain railed against earmarks and testified before his fellow pols to get rid of them. But
The Washington Post's Fact Checker column says McCain's claim that eliminating earmarks would save $100 billion a year right away "is largely fantasy."
Gov. Palin's administration has fed off of earmarks.
You can watch this YouTube video to see her saying she would not, if elected, interfere with the "bridge to nowhere" project that McCain was so critical of (above). After she took office, she rejected the earmark money. But that is just one project -- there are more.
The AP reports:
Under Palin's leadership, Alaska this year asked for almost $300 per person in requests for pet projects from one of McCain's top adversaries: indicted Sen. Ted Stevens. That's more than any other state received, per person, from Congress for the current budget year. Other states got just $34 worth of local projects per person this year, on average, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based watchdog group. The state government's earmark requests to Congress in her first year in office exceeded $550 million, more than $800 per resident. Palin actually reduced the state government's requests for special projects this year in the wake of President Bush's demand for a cutback in earmarks.
For years, McCain, while fighting earmarks, listed projects that he said were wasteful. Among those on the list were some earmarks that were going right to the city where Sarah Palin was mayor: Wasilla, Alaska.
The Los Angeles Times says:
In 2001, McCain's list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town -- one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.
McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin's tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002. The funding was provided to help direct locally grown produce to schools, prisons and other government institutions, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
Wasilla received $11.9 million in earmarks from 2000 to 2003. The results of this spending are very apparent today. (The town also benefited from $15 million in federal funds to promote regional rail transportation.)
So, are all earmarks evil and wasteful?The problem in answering that question is that there is not a universal definition of what an earmark is. For example, as I noted above, aid to Israel, Jordan and Egypt is technically an earmark as defined by the Congressional Research Service.
So, as The Washington Post points out, if anybody really eliminated all earmarked spending, a good portion of it would just be shifted into the regular budget bills. There even is disagreement about how much is actually spent on earmarks. Look at this, again from
The Post's Fact Checker column:
By most definitions of the term, the amount of money spent on earmarks is much lower than the CRS study. The Office for Management and the Budget came up with a figure for $16.9 billion in the 2008 appropriation bills. Taxpayers for Commonsense, an independent watchdog group that focuses on wasteful spending, identified $18.3 billion worth of earmarks in the 2008 bills, a 23 per cent cut from a record $23.6 billion set in 2005.
How much of this $18.3 billion could be eliminated is a "difficult question that we have not yet figured out," said Taxpayers for Commonsense vice-president Steve Ellis. The figure includes such items as $4 billion for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which could not be eliminated without halting hundreds of construction projects around the country. Another big chunk goes to military construction, including housing for servicemen and their families, which McCain has also promised not to touch.
Bruce Riedl, a budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it might be possible to eliminate roughly half the expenditure on earmarks every year, i.e. around $9 billion, using the Taxpayers for Commonsense figures. He identified $5 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, most of which goes to local governments, as a prime target for cuts. Even if earmarks were eliminated altogether, many other expenditures would have to be shifted to other parts of the budget.
