As a young congressional staffer in 1997, I mostly answered constituent mail and took visitors on Capitol tours. I was eager to prove myself, and so when a senior staffer asked me to pursue funding for storm-battered eastern Colorado ranchers, I snapped at the chance. A freakish October storm had killed thousands of cattle, and their carcasses lay frozen across the congressman’s district.
The timing was good. An appropriations bill was headed for a final vote. My fervent calls to Appropriations Committee staff secured an earmark in the bill for the removal of dead cattle. I had done it — my first legislative success! I helped people!
The pride was short-lived. The next day I read a newspaper story about a family who had stayed up all night moving their cattle around in that blinding storm to keep the animals from dying. The rancher didn’t lose a single head. Even though it was nearly 20 years ago, I remember my exact thought: “I took from those who stayed awake and gave to those who slept.” It never sat well with me. What gave me the right to decide winners and losers?
Recently, the 2011 ban on earmarks has come into question. The debate centers on the effectiveness, the expense, and the public perception of congressionally designated spending. No one is pondering whether earmarks are fair. Why would they?
Earmarks, also called pork-barrel spending, are funds set aside in appropriations bills at the request of a congressman or congresswoman for a project in his or her district. The beneficiaries do not have to compete for a federal grant through the usual competitive process.
Pork projects are not new. However, their use vastly increased through the late ’90s and early 2000s. Some of the spending made headlines. Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., went to jail for trading earmarks for bribes and Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere became symbolic of the wastefulness and frivolity of pork projects. That $400 million bridge connecting the town of Ketchikan to an island with some 50 residents never did get built and Alaska spent the money elsewhere. The moratorium on earmarks, however, has stuck for now.
Critics of the earmark ban argue that pork projects are not fiscally irresponsible. They aren’t the main driver of the $19.8 trillion federal debt. They only constitute a tiny percentage of overall spending. Whatap $100 billion in earmarked spending in a $3.8 trillion federal budget? When you’re close to bankruptcy, why stop buying a daily latte?
Also, the executive bureaucracy isn’t a model of prudence when it doles out the dollars. For every earmarked Bridge to Nowhere, there’s an equally shining example of government waste funded through competitive grant making. A few recent examples: taxpayers paid for a $48,000 study on the history of smoking in Russia, a $50,000 study of sea monkeys, and an $800,000 video game about kids eating veggies.
Critics also contend that earmarks are essential for a return to normal political order from the current divisive gridlock. Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch argued recently in The Atlantic that earmarks “helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders, it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward loyalists.”
If most members were willing to take up entitlement reform, balance the budget, jettison ineffective programs, tackle the national debt, eliminate big business and farm subsidies, or cast other hard votes for the price of a community center or post office, it might be worth it. They weren’t before the ban. A more likely result would be the return of pork projects without broader reforms. Itap in no one’s self interest to ask whether such spending is the right thing to do.
Krista Kafer (tokrista@msn.com) is co-host of “Kelley and Kafer” airing 4 to 7 p.m. on 710 KNUS and a professor of communication at Colorado Christian University.
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