Jack Kingston

Athens, Mar 26 -

Somewhere between Congressman Paul Broun's metaphysical abhorrence of federal budget earmarks and Congressman Jack Kingston's ability to bring millions of dollars in the often under-scrutinized grants back home to Georgia lies a reasonable approach to getting that money into worthwhile projects in this state and elsewhere in the nation.

While there's little doubt that Broun's recent pledge not to place any earmarks in next year's federal budget is a sincere expression of the rock-ribbed conservatism he took to Congress last year, it's also hard to escape the notion that the no-earmark pledges taken by other members of the Georgia delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives are little more than pandering to the electorate. Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, for instance, is among those in the Georgia delegation who took the no-earmark pledge, even as his name appeared on earmark requests for funding two University of Georgia projects.

It's also interesting to note that the pledge taken by Broun and others will cover only the upcoming federal fiscal year. Presuming that if earmarks are bad for the 2009 fiscal year, they ought to be bad for any fiscal year, the limited pledge against earmarks is a tacit recognition of one, or both, of the following realities: Some earmark spending can be justified, and some earmarking is necessary - from a political standpoint, anyway - so that members of Congress can convince the home folks that they're getting some premium in return for their tax dollars.

It's patently obvious that some earmarks represent a worthwhile expenditure of taxpayer dollars. A Tuesday story in this newspaper listed the 11 earmarks in the fiscal 2008 budget that will fund projects at the University of Georgia, among which are a $1.2 million outlay for research into alternative fuels and a $1.8 million outlay for research into detecting nerve gas. As long as that money is being used to fund research that's not being duplicated with federal dollars on other campuses, it's hard to find anything wrong with spending that could chart a new course for this nation's energy future, or could protect its soldiers and, potentially, its citizens, from nerve gas attacks.

Unfortunately, in discussions of earmarking, such worthwhile projects all too often are lumped in with dubious initiatives such as the fabled $223 million outlay from a couple of years ago for a bridge connecting a tiny Alaska town to a nearby island with a population of 50.

In a recent meeting with members of this newspaper's editorial board, Congressman Kingston expressed a real interest in gaining some control over earmarks, and talked about efforts to assemble a bipartisan committee of representatives and senators to develop some plans for reining in those expenditures.

Frankly, though, it shouldn't take a committee - much less a committee of politicians with a vested interest in not making any particularly radical changes to the earmarking process - to figure out how to get some control over that aspect of federal spending.

Any member of Congress who is truly interested in reforming the earmarking process - a matter of reining in spending while ensuring that worthy projects that might not otherwise be funded get a shot at some federal dollars - could simply post the earmarks he or she is requesting on his or her official Web site, along with a justification for the request. From there, the lawmaker could solicit constituents' comments on the earmarks, and let those comments guide his or her actions.

In short, there's nothing wrong with earmarks that a little publication and a little justification, rather than the draconian approach advocated by Congressman Broun and others, couldn't cure.

Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 032608
http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/032608/opinion_2008032600103.shtml