The Stealth Agenda of Earmark "Reformers"

PBS Now this week had a long piece on Congress's pork barrel spending habits. The piece attacked the rise of congressional "earmarks" under Republican control of Congress, quoting self-righteous lawmakers like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) offering their moral indignation at earmarks. Strangely, however, no one really explained what the alternative to congressional earmarking is. And that's not by accident.

Think about what a congressional earmark is: it's a line in a big spending bill, inserted by a member of Congress, to direct federal funds to a specific project. If you outlaw earmarking, as many of these earmark "reformers" like Coburn seem to desire, you delegate the responsibility of directing that spending to the executive branch. And that begs the question: why is it better for unelected appointees in the executive branch to decide how federal money is spend than having your elected officials decide? It isn't - and that's the part of the story that's not being discussed. Earmark "reform," if done overzealously, is just one huge power grab by the executive branch over the last true power that Congress still retains: the power of the purse.

A Boston Globe article from 2005 gives us a frightening glimpse of what such a power grab might mean in the future. Usurping Congress's power of the purse would give presidents - especially aggressively partisan ones like George W. Bush - even more ability than described by this article to target federal funds on the basis of their political ambitions.

To be sure, it is no surprise that the Republican Party is trying to further strengthen executive power in all arenas. Such a power grab both improves the GOP's ability to use public policy for their partisan goals right now, and more broadly, centralizing power in the execuive branch is inherently less (small "d") democratic by virtue of the fact that it is a branch run by appointees, and not elected officials. We can see this in the GOP's recent efforts to politicize foreign aid, in its defense of the President's illegal wiretapping program, in its quest for a new Patriot Act, in its penchant for secrecy, and now, in its backdoor attempt to usurp Congress's power of the purse through earmarking "reform" (a topic that also, not coincidentally, distracts from the bigger problem of a campaign finance system that encourages pay-to-play shenanigans).

It is true, the rise of earmarking is a problem, and has fueled some of the corruption scandals as lobbyists use campaign cash to essentially buy earmarks from corrupt lawmakers. But the question should not be whether to ban earmarking or not - it should be how to make sure earmarking doesn't get out of control. Because again, the question of earmarking is really a question of who should get to decide how federal money is spent - Congress, or unelected appointees in the executive branch? There's a lot of talk in the PBS piece about the supposed outrage that congressional spending bills allocate money to different lawmakers, who get to direct that spending within their district. But there's no discussion of why that is so bad? Why, for instance, should we trust a bureaucrat - or worse, a political operative - at the transportation department to know what a congressional district's transportation needs are and not the elected Congressman who is supposed to be an expert on the needs of his/her district?

You might say that well, a lawmaker is going to direct that spending with their own partisan political agenda. And you are absolutely right - but again, why is a lawmakers' partisan political agenda any better or worse than the executive branch's? Because if you think the executive branch won't use earmarking "reform" to politicize spending on its own, then I have some real estate to sell you...

Solving the earmarking problem is indeed difficult, but not impossible. We have to explore what really is at the heart of the problem, and then go after the specifics. Having worked on the Appropriations Committee, I'll try to explain what I think are the two main problems, and offer some solutions:

- The spenders are also the directors: The first key problem in today's system is that the lawmakers directing the money through earmarking are also often the lawmakers deciding the overall spending levels. That means currently, the rise of earmarking naturally leads to an unbridled and intensified pressure to spend more taxpayer dollars. It would be one thing if the size of overall pots of money were set by one group of lawmakers, and another group of lawmakers got to decide the specific projects that money could be spent on. And remember, that's technically how it is supposed to work in Congress - there are authorizing committees that set the maximum amounts allowable to spend on given programs, and then there is the appropriations committee that actually decides how federal dollars are spent on a year-by-year basis. But the process has broken down, and "unauthorized" spending now regularly happens to the tune of billions of dollars. As just one example, this 1998 report by the Congressional Budget Office showed $25 billion in unauthorized spending in NASA and the Justice Department alone. Thus, setting new rules to make the authorization and appropriations process actually work would be a solid step.

- No disclosure allows abuse: In the PBS piece, some lawmakers do hit on an important point: many congressional earmarks - and especially some of the most egregious ones - are inserted into bills at the very last minute, with no disclosure of which Member of Congress authored them. Thus, we need new rules that would force the public disclosure of earmark authors and that would force Congress to provide enough time for the public (and other lawmakers) to read these massive bills. That would go a long way to creating some accountability, and bringing the system back under control. Lawmakers would be less likely to try to sneak in the most wasteful pork or most narrowly targeted special interest provisions if they knew their names would be publicly attached to it. Similarly, budget hawks in Congress would have a new tool to force a debate on egregious earmarks, and try to eliminate them through amendments (which, even in the dictatorial House, are still allowed on appropriations bills). That would be a lot more accountability than simply handing over all spending control to the executive branch, which already tries to hide many of its key spending decisions.

Remember - I am not defending the current abuse of earmarking in general, nor am I endorsing the specific - and truly ridiculous - "bridge to nowhere" projects that have come from earmarking. I've seen up close the abuse of this system when I worked on the Appropriations Committee and there is absolutely no doubt that the system that is supposed to provide some checks on earmarking has clearly broken down, and needs a fix.

But we shouldn't let the out of control abuse of earmarking by the GOP to become an excuse to pursue a truly dangerous goal of handing over more power to the executive branch. We cannot forget that earmarking as a concept is both value neutral and inherently political. The term is really just a euphemism for "deciding how money is spent." Making those decisions is why we have a government, and because our government is elected through a political process, those decisions are going to have politics surrounding them. The question is whether you have congressional earmarking whereby elected officials get to decide how money is spent, or you have executive branch earmarking whereby unelected appointees get to decide how money is spent? There is going to be politicization in both - the question is who should be vested with that political power?

As a small "d" democrat, I (like the Founding Fathers who gave Congress the power of the purse) would prefer elected officials to choose, especially if we can fix the system in pretty straightforward ways previously mentioned. Put those earmark reforms with a publicly financed system of elections that controls the pay-to-play nature of congressional politics these days, and we will have gone a long way to cleaning up Washington.

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