Administration discovers--surprise!--that Congress likes pork

It is a ritual that most new administrations go through: Budget officials scrub last year's appropriations bills and--with shock and indignation--discover that Congress likes its pork. Really likes its pork. Well, the Bushies are going through the ritual now. Folks who prepared the President's budget are aghast that last year's spending bills contained 6,183 earmarks.

"People say earmarks are part of the grease that makes government work and, to some extent, that's true," John Cogan--a Stanford University economist and former Office of Management and Budget deputy director who prepared the administration's spending blueprint--told National Journal last month. He went on to call the 6,183 earmarks "an awful lot of grease."

Welcome to the way Washington now works. With margins so close in the House and Senate in recent years, something has to drive appropriations bills. In some cases, pigs have been behind the wheel.

And if the administration intends to try to cut members' projects, it had better study recent history. In 1977, Jimmy Carter came to town and developed a list of water projects he wanted cut. Carter, a former governor just like President Bush, decided he would try to go to the mat with Congress over the projects--and ended up battling during the spring and summer.

Members warned that the list was doing damage to the administration on Capitol Hill. Eventually, a compromise was reached, in which nine of 18 projects in Carter's whittled-down list were not funded. But even so, then-Rep. Tom Bevill, D-Ala., the chairman of the conference committee that worked out the deal, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: "We intend to finance them.... This is our temporary position. We are just going along to get this bill through." And you can be sure most of the projects eventually were tucked in somewhere.

Over time, the number of member projects has grown even larger and, with a budget surplus looming, there is little chance they will decrease. "Someone once said, 'If I don't get parochial...then my constituents will send someone here who does,' " said James Dyer, staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. "It's a normal part of the congressional process." Dyer said the projects do carry an "air of legitimacy" because Congress has had to approve each of the projects.

Dyer pointed out that appropriators are not the only ones watching out for their pork. He said recent highway and airport reauthorization bills launched myriad projects. "There's a runway for all of America in there," he said of the airport bill.

Ironically, a senior House Democratic aide agreed with Cogan, saying that Republicans have become pork kings, despite their reputation as budget cutters. "We've never had the number of projects that we've had over the past six years," the aide said. "It's out of control, and it's out of control at the behest of the Republican leadership."

Some funding bills, he said, must be project-driven. Take the military construction measure. By its nature, that bill has to earmark funds for specific building projects. While conventional wisdom might be that it is easier to hide pork projects in end-of-year spending bills, the aide said earlier individual funding measures included their share of earmarked projects.

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in December that last year's omnibus spending bill contained a huge number of earmarks. "In the run-up to this final agreement, over $24 billion in pork barrel spending was doled out, and that figure will surely climb once we get a good look at the bills before us," McCain warned his colleagues.

The House Democratic aide said no one should be surprised if the larger Bush plan to be released in April contains administration pork priorities. "When we get this budget, we'll see a whole hell of a lot of projects in there," he predicted.

Few people pay attention to the report, but CBO has released its annual list of programs that Congress funded this fiscal year even though the programs had not been reauthorized. The report shows that Congress spent $112.3 billion on programs that it had failed to reauthorize. As usual, the list includes large programs, such as foreign aid and the Justice Department.

The report also shows that Congress has an additional $309.6 billion in programs whose authorizations expire before the end of the current fiscal year. That figure may look unusually large because it includes the annual defense reauthorization bill.

In an effort to highlight the problem, some House Republicans have pushed through a new rule requiring appropriations reports to list all unauthorized programs funded in the legislation, as well as the last year the program was authorized.