Pork defenders praise earmarks

David Minge lost his congressional seat in 2000 by 155 votes. The four-term Democrat from Minnesota was a member of the Pork Busters Coalition, a bipartisan group that opposed earmarking, a process through which members of Congress steer federal funding to local projects without going through competitive grant procedures or other objective mechanisms.

Minge opposed earmarking; he believed that projects should be awarded taxpayer dollars based on merit, not on a sponsor's standing in Congress. "It was awkward for me to tell constituencies that I didn't support pork-barrel legislation, because they felt they had fair and appropriate requests," said Minge, now a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

A local official joked that unless he got earmarks for a highway project, he would erect a statue of Minge at a congested intersection. "The leaders of this particular community resented the fact that I would not sell my political soul to obtain the federal dollars to remedy their local problem of traffic congestion," Minge said. "Given the margin of 155 votes by which I lost my re-election bid in 2000, this stand may have cost me my seat." Minge's successor in Congress, Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., promised voters in his 2000 campaign that if elected, he would deliver federal money to improve his district's roads. He has indeed delivered. In the 2003 appropriations cycle, Kennedy secured $4.25 million in earmarks for transportation projects in his district, including $500,000 for transit facilities. He got another $6.45 million in the 2004 appropriations bill, including $2 million for an airport runway extension.

Kennedy also landed a seat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which is responsible for the six-year federal transportation authorization bill now before Congress. Kennedy got his district $35 million in earmarks in the House-passed version of that bill, including $3 million to replace a bridge and $3 million for a highway bypass. His congressional seat is considered safe for years to come.

Examples like Minge's defeat help to explain the rise of congressional earmarking in recent years. Though the practice has long existed, it was limited for most of American history to a few projects sponsored by a few well-positioned lawmakers, with most of the federal money being distributed to states, local governments, and other institutions via formulas and competitive grant processes. In 1982, the transportation authorization bill carried 10 earmarks.

But in the years since, political pressure from constituencies around the country, coupled with lawmakers' willingness to pursue earmarks, has made pork a growth enterprise. In the 1991 transportation bill, the earmarks numbered 538. The 1998 bill carried 1,800. The House-passed bill this year -- which now must be reconciled with the Senate version -- has 2,881 comparable earmarks worth $9.6 billion, with another $1.5 billion available for additional earmarks and several billion more dollars set aside in earmark-like categories. The Senate version carries no earmarks, though senators have secured them in past transportation authorization cycles, once the House and Senate began reconciling their versions of the bill.

Senators and House members are increasingly placing earmarks in the annual appropriations bills as well. The 2004 omnibus appropriations bill is a prime example. In addition to containing seven of the 13 annual spending bills, including those for transportation, agriculture, and labor, health, and education, the bill also carried nearly 8,000 earmarks worth a total of $10 billion.

Lawmakers tout their earmarks as proof that they are looking out for their states and districts. But critics say earmarking is bad government. They say it is pork designed to satiate constituents rather than achieve results for taxpayers. They say earmarking pulls decisions away from state and local governments that could better decide how to spend money distributed by formula, and from impartial administrators in executive branch agencies, such as transportation experts at the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration.

Earmarking allows money to be spent on projects that go through no vetting process or formal evaluation, and it steers federal money to projects in the states and districts of powerful legislators at the expense of regions with less-influential lawmakers. "It's wrong to make funding decisions for political reasons," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., the House's most ardent opponent of earmarking.

Earmarking has become a sticking point for the 2004 transportation authorization bill. Conservative commentators, incensed at the overall size of the House and Senate proposals -- $275 billion and $318 billion, respectively -- have homed in on the earmarks and have blasted lawmakers, particularly Republicans, who they say are wasting taxpayer dollars. News stories and editorials have also focused on pork projects and have pointed out the most questionable ones, such as the plan to build a bridge in Alaska connecting a small town to a sparsely populated island, for which House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, locked up $175 million. Citing the earmarks as a key objection, President Bush has threatened to veto both transportation plans because of their spending levels.

But does earmarking really merit all this agitation? Some state and local officials and political scientists downplay its significance. Young and the transportation committee's ranking member, James Oberstar, D-Minn., defend the practice, as do other lawmakers and outsiders, citing the relative extent of earmarking, the way projects are selected, and the results of many earmarked efforts. "A lot of it is really, really bad," conceded Scott Frisch, a political science professor at California State University (Channel Islands) who has studied the rise of pork-barrel spending. "Yes, it happens, it did happen, and it will always happen. But it's not a big deal."

Small Potatoes

Take the House-passed transportation bill, which Young said will cost $275 billion. Of that total, $11.1 billion, or 4 percent, is set aside for earmarks in a category called "high-priority projects," which also made up 4 percent of the transportation bills in 1991 and 1998. But the 2004 bill carries other forms of pork, including $6.6 billion in a category called "projects of national and regional significance," which have yet to be determined. A few billion more dollars are in categories that lawmakers are likely to earmark in annual transportation appropriations bills. Still, 84 percent of highway funding in the bill goes to states through formulas based on less-contentious factors such as miles of highway, road use, and population.

Similarly, even though the 2004 appropriations measure carried some 8,000 earmarks worth $10 billion, they accounted for just 1.2 percent of the $822 billion bill. "Pork is still such a small part of the budget," Frisch said.

Oberstar, who in the House bill nailed down $90 million in earmarks for his district, contended that such allocations provide a small chance for members of Congress to correct imbalances in funding within their states. If spread evenly, the high-priority-project earmarks in the bill would average $25.6 million for each of the 435 congressional districts.

"Members understand the needs of their state, and when they are bypassed, when the state [department of transportation] does not address the needs in their districts, then we give them an opportunity once every six years to do that in the transportation bill, to designate projects according to the needs that members see best," Oberstar said on the House floor on April 1.

Young built on that argument: "I have some members in this body that get no money out of DOT in their district because they are sparsely populated and all the money goes to the large urban areas. This is one time there is a fairness doctrine."

Picking Pork

But even if members know their districts, what do they know about transportation? How do they know which projects are worth funding and which aren't? Peter (Jack) Basso, a former Transportation Department official, said the department once tried to launch an offensive against earmarks. To build a case, officials began reviewing earmarks to see whether the projects they funded would have been eligible for federal money through normal merit-based channels. After finding that most of them would have qualified, the department abandoned its probe. State departments of transportation, in fact, had requested many of the projects.

As it turns out, all states have processes -- some more rigorous than others -- for identifying projects that would benefit from earmarked money. States get most of their federal transportation dollars through formulas, but earmarks have become simply an additional funding stream. Many projects get funding through formulas as well as through earmarks.

Delaware, for example, is slated to receive two earmarks in the 2004 House-passed transportation bill. One is for $5 million for projects to improve Interstate 95, which runs through the state's northern edge. The other is for $5 million for a bridge connecting Bethany Beach and Dewey Beach. The state has gone through extensive planning processes for both projects and has devoted federal funding from the normal formula as well as state funding to them. Nathan Hayward, Delaware's secretary of transportation, said he seeks earmarks for only the highest-priority projects. Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., the state's lone representative, appreciates that approach, since he dislikes earmarking. "I've been absolutely clear that we're not going to send [Castle] a list of 30 things," Hayward said.

Most states do come up with extensive wish lists for projects. The Transportation Commission of Colorado has an annual process for coordinating earmark requests. Local officials explain to the commission why their projects need special funding; the commission then decides what projects to include and submits its list to the Colorado congressional delegation. "We have a very clear process that we go through with our planning partners throughout the state," said Joe Blake, chairman of the Colorado Transportation Commission. "It's very much a grassroots, respected process. We would like to remain as consistent as we can with our local planning partners. If anyone comes in outside the process, they get asked how their request fits in with the statewide priorities. It has generally worked."

Fred VanKirk, West Virginia's secretary of transportation, said 99 percent of his state's earmark projects have gone through his department. Other states have less perfect track records, but even then, projects have often gone through vetting processes on a regional and local level.

For example, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments develops an annual list of the top projects for the central part of California and then works with the area's congressional delegation to get funding. "If we don't have our act together, the money is going to go somewhere else," said Tom Zlotkowski, director of the Sacramento County Department of Transportation. "We're learning from other jurisdictions." The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada similarly vets projects and has obtained earmarked funds for its monorail system and the city's beltway. "Our board ranks projects in a public process," said commission General Manager Jacob Snow.

Pork opponents often pore through lists of earmarks to find egregious examples of inappropriate funding. Complaints often rise about the numerous bike paths, museums, nature trails, sidewalks, and beautification projects sprinkled through transportation bills. But those projects, too, are eligible for federal funding under normal federal transportation program formulas. States spend millions of federal formula dollars on these "transportation enhancements" every year. They are popular in districts across the country, and most Democrats and Republicans in the House united on a 327-90 vote last September to keep funding available for them.

Some federal transportation funding each year is left up to the discretion of the Department of Transportation. The department has set up merit-based processes for selecting discretionary projects, but a DOT inspector general's review in 1998 found that the department's rationale for decisions "was neither explained nor documented." About 60 percent of projects the Federal Highway Administration picked for funding were not actually ranked as the highest priority through the agency's merit-based processes. Although several former Transportation Department officials admitted that politics sometimes played a role in such decisions, they said that projects were selected mostly on merit. Still, distrust of the executive branch is one reason that Congress leaves little discretion to DOT. Congress earmarks most of the money that is theoretically up to the department to disburse.

Even projects that Congress earmarks, however, are subject to Transportation Department oversight. The department requires recipients of federal funds to fill out forms and justify expenditures, even if the money came through earmarks.

About 30 percent of the Federal Transit Administration's budget, for example, is earmarked. Every "new start" transit project is earmarked and "subject to extensive FTA analysis, rating, funding recommendations, and oversight," transit officials said in a written response to questions. Bus projects and welfare-to-work programs are also fully earmarked, but transit officials said that recipients are "subject to normal grantee oversight, including, for example, triennial reviews, financial management oversight reviews, state management reviews, procurement reviews, and civil-rights reviews."

The Federal Highway Administration has similar procedures for road projects. In fact, some projects that don't fulfill the procedures never get built. The money earmarked for some jobs sat around for years. In the 1970s, lawmakers earmarked millions of dollars under a program called "Bridges on Federal Dams." Two decades later, in 1994, Congress rescinded and reallocated the $9.5 million that was still waiting to be spent on projects that no one planned to build. Last year, Congress rescinded nearly $6 million from about 30 earmarked projects, including some that hadn't been worked on for more than a decade, including a bridge deck in Washington, D.C., a road to a park in Illinois, and feasibility studies for highways in several other states.

Former Federal Transit Administrator Gordon Linton said there was a natural tension between the department, which is trying to administer a national program, and members of Congress, who are looking out for district and state interests. Still, he said, projects should be held to high standards. "Projects need to stand the test of time," Linton said. "The value for taxpayer dollars has to be there."

Where's the Beef?

Several appropriations subcommittees and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee require members of Congress to fill out extensive questionnaires justifying projects, in an attempt to weed out bad ones. The transportation panel's questionnaire asks for 21 items, including the name of the qualified entity that is going to work on the project, a confirmation that the project is eligible for highway or transit funds under federal law, the project schedule, and a letter of support from state or regional transportation officials.

Using questionnaires and other tools, administrators aim to ensure that earmarked projects are worthwhile expenditures. And proponents of earmarks are eager to point out examples of worthy projects.

One such example is the Job Access and Reverse Commute Program, which helps welfare-to-work participants get to their jobs. The $100 million-a-year program was created in the 1998 transportation bill. It started out in fiscal 1999 as a competitive grant program, attracting 266 applicants for 179 grants. Competition was so strong that applicants started circumventing the department by getting earmarks, and by 2003, all of the program's money was earmarked. In fiscal 2004, 37 states and the District of Columbia received funding through the program, and most riders in a survey deemed the services important. A majority, further, said they could not get to work without the program. Congress has proposed a funding increase for it in the 2004 bill.

No one denies that many poor workers are benefiting, but people have mixed feelings about whether earmarking has been good for the job-access service. Many advocates for the poor say that earmarking has raised congressional awareness of the program and has helped it secure more funding every year. But some say that earmarking has sometimes shut out worthy applicants, while others say that the most-organized, most-effective applicants have received funding through both grants and earmarking processes.

The House transportation bill proposes turning the job-access program into a formula system, which would distribute money evenly and predictably across the country, rather than just to groups that seek -- and obtain -- earmarking. "It would be better if it were formularized," Joyce Rose, a House transportation committee staffer, told public transportation officials this spring. "You will know how much your state gets."

The plan to shift the job-access program from earmarking to formula funding, however, faces an uphill battle in the Senate. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., is chairman of both the Senate Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee and the Senate Banking Committee, which authorizes transit programs. As head of the transportation panel, Shelby has earmarked money for the job-access program and wants to keep that power in the future. "I fail to see how sending out grant funds based on formula creates accountability within the program or allows flexibility on a year-to-year basis," Shelby told Federal Transit Administrator Jennifer Dorn at a March hearing. Critics like Shelby say that a formula would spread the money even to areas that don't have good programs set up, whereas earmark recipients are at least organized enough to lobby for the money and meet the FTA's oversight requirements.

Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., a leading proponent of the job-access program when it was first proposed in the House, said he supports using either funding method, since he thinks the program has worked under both systems. "Whichever way you've got, somebody gets a little advantage and somebody gets a little shortchanged," Davis said. "The idea should be to get the greatest amount of resource to the place it's going to benefit the most."

Fry the Bacon

The idea that earmarking is just another funding method infuriates pork opponents. Flake, who has not requested earmarks from any committee, said he believes that earmarking puts more money in the districts and states of a minority of powerful lawmakers at the expense of the vast areas represented by everyone else.

He's particularly upset by the House version of the 2004 transportation bill, which has a clear earmarking hierarchy. Average members of the House each got about $14 million in earmarks to spread around their districts; some members in competitive districts got earmarks in the range of $20 million to $35 million; members of the transportation committee got $40 million to $65 million; Oberstar got $90 million; and Chairman Don Young got $590 million, the equivalent of the amount that 42 average members of the House received. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., also took in above-average totals. Flake said that members of Congress should not go along with such a system.

"We're giving power to people in power," Flake said. "I like to describe this bill as the 'road to serfdom.' "

A similar skewing of earmarks happens each year in the appropriations process, with appropriations committee leaders and ranking members doling out extra heapings of earmarks to themselves and to favored friends before spreading the leftover wealth. Seniority of a district or state's representatives in Congress has become a key determinant in how much money is earmarked for it.

Flake and other budget hawks are particularly annoyed that earmarking has accelerated under Republican control of both houses. He said Republicans talk about controlling spending but can't control themselves when presented with the opportunity to steer money to their districts. "It's that you're too close to the candy barrel and it's too easy to reach in and take some," Flake said. "We've convinced ourselves this is the way to get re-elected."

Flake said he faced criticism from his opponent in this year's primary over his position on earmarking and has to regularly resist pressure from local officials in his district for earmarked projects. "The cities and towns, a lot of them have concluded it's the only way to get funding," he said.

Young and other influential lawmakers who benefit the most from earmarking don't attempt to justify the distribution of funds among members of Congress. Instead, they contend that they were elected to address the needs of their districts and are fulfilling their duty by taking advantage of their positions. Indeed, since most long-term members of Congress are virtually guaranteed their seats by the numerous perks of incumbency, they don't need to rely on excessive earmarking to hold on to their jobs. But they do it anyway, in part out of a sense of duty.

Linton, the former transit administrator, also served for 11 years on the public transit committee of the Pennsylvania legislature. "Constituents were always looking for projects," Linton said. "It was very important for them to see something and feel something and touch something. That is the way it's going to be with local constituencies. Unless we start electing officials in a different way, there's always going to be a need to bring home the bacon."

Another reason, Frisch said, is that the size of one's earmarks is a tangible measure of one's power, and power is unsurprisingly a motivator for members of Congress. "They want to be thought of as movers and shakers," Frisch said.

In defense of the practice, Young emphasizes that the earmarks in his transportation bill, just like formula and grant money, are targeted at appropriate projects. "Every nickel that is earmarked in this bill goes to a form of transportation," he said on April 1. "No dollars go outside that for any other purpose, regardless of what you might read. It goes to a form of transportation."

But just as most observers see no end in sight for earmarking, they also see no end in sight for criticizing it. Flake anticipates a tipping point at which the growing use of earmarking becomes too much for people to bear. He even predicts that Republicans could lose their majority if that happens. "It's going to come crashing down at some point. We've got to be pretty close," he said, arguing that the anti-earmarking principle is violated whether there's a little or a lot of pork spending going on. "Why not just earmark it all?" he asked. "We're headed that way."