We'll earmark funds if we feel like it, appropriations chair tells OMB

House Appropriations Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., escalated a war of words with the Bush administration Wednesday over a sticky and territorial issue in budget diplomacy: earmarks in the Labor-HHS spending bill.

The administration has proposed eliminating funding for some of the 690 projects in the fiscal 2003 Labor-HHS bill, to make up a $1.3 billion shortfall in the Pell Grant college scholarship program. In a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, Young threw down the gauntlet, citing chapter and clause of the Constitution.

"This leaves no ambiguity," Young's letter declared. "The power of the purse resides solely with the Congress. Unless the Constitution is amended, Congress will continue to exercise its discretion over federal funds and will earmark those funds for purposes we deem appropriate."

The letter comes in response not just to the Pell Grant problem, but also to comments made earlier this week, when the administration's 2003 budget was released.

The budget document noted, "In 2002, 100 percent of the $312 million appropriated for health facilities construction was earmarked by the Congress, leaving HHS with no discretion in deciding which construction projects would be funded."

The earmarks, including projects for at least 41 states and Puerto Rico, consumed nearly three single-spaced pages in the Congressional Record of Dec. 18.

At his budget briefing Monday, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson complained for the second year in a row that earmarks steer money away from other needed programs.

But Young said the committee would not back down.

"All wisdom on the allocation of federal grant funding does not reside in the executive branch," he wrote. "Many of these projects are in rural communities or from small community-based organizations that lack the capacity to hire grantwriters and compete with more sophisticated organizations for funding."