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March 12, 2007

March Madness - Public-sector lobbyists lavish gifts on congressmen and their staffers. The scandal is it's perfectly legal.

By John Fund

Wall Street Journal

Capitol Hill is in the grips of "March Madness"--and I don't mean the NCAA basketball playoffs. "This is also the month that hundreds of lobbyists annually descend upon Washington seeking grants and special projects in next year's budget. The new Democratic Congress has pledged to cut down on such earmarked spending, but you can't tell from the parade of lobbyists strolling the halls of Congress this month. Perhaps it's because the new Democrats--like their GOP predecessors--appear unwilling to change the culture of corruption that has been built up around earmarks.

Take something as simple as bans of gifts from lobbyists. In their favor-seeking, all of the lobbyists visiting Capitol Hill are bound by House and Senate ethics rules that cap most individual gifts at $50 per elected official or staffer, with an annual limit of $100 per recipient from any single source. But local governments, public universities and Indian tribes are exempt from the limit, so they are able to shower members and their staffs with such goodies as luxury skybox tickets to basketball games and front-row concert tickets.

Having members or their key aides attend such free events in the company of glad-handing university presidents and local government officials winds up costing taxpayers a pretty penny. Much of the explosive growth in earmarks has been directed to local governments and universities. While they are entertaining members of Congress, you can bet the hosts at such events are making the case for pork-barrel projects that range from a new building on campus to a new bridge. Some of the projects are ludicrous--the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska comes to mind--but most others have some benefit but simply can't be justified as a federal priority.

There's no doubt that spending to lobby for these projects has exploded. Universities and colleges spent at least $75 million in 2005 on lobbying according to a study by USA Today. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that $2 billion in grants flowed into higher education in 2003. "The return on investment is simply too good to pass up, which is why so many lobbyists now can convince local governments they will recoup their steep lobbying fees by getting far more in earmark dollars back," says Ronald Utt, a former federal budget official now at the Heritage Foundation. The number of lobbyists specializing in earmarks has doubled in the last six years.

Defenders of the public-sector lobbying loophole call it a necessary part of communication with Congress on important public-policy issues. But then why have the gift bans on all other lobbyists, including those from nonprofit organizations? The same lobbying rules that apply to private-sector lobbyists should also apply to taxpayer-funded government lobbyists.

Certainly the current system is ripe for abuse. Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff once told me that he built his lobbying business in such a way that all his major clients were Indian tribes and local governments, in part because he knew he could wine and dine power brokers on Capitol Hill without breaking any laws.

Take Conrad Burns, the Republican Montana senator who was defeated for re-election last year after it was revealed he had collected $150,000 in contributions from Mr. Abramoff and his Indian tribe clients. Burns staffers were also treated to such perks as junkets and lavish parties at the Super Bowl. The investments appeared to pay off. "Every appropriation we wanted [from Mr. Burns's committee] we got." Mr. Abramoff told Vanity Fair last year.

Mr. Burns denied any improprieties, but his vaunted ability to bring home pork to constituents appeared in a new light. His boast that he brought home such federal projects as $597,000 for the Montana Sheep Institute to $8 million to encourage private space travel suddenly looked like petty looting of the Treasury rather than solicitude to state interests. Mr. Burns lost re-election last year, in a state President Bush carried in 2004 by more than 20% of the vote.

GOP Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona and a bipartisan group of members tried but failed last year to close the "March Madness" lobbying loophole. This week they will try again by introducing an amendment to the House's pending ethics-reform bill. A coalition of taxpayer-rights groups, including Americans for Prosperity and the National Taxpayers Union, has produced a humorous video on how the 64 NCAA tournament basketball games are used to run up the taxpayer's tab by pushing for more federal funding (TheRealMarchMadness.com).

State and local taxpayers are already footing the bill for these free tickets and other gifts to elected officials, as well as for the lobbying fees that are spent to further influence those officials. Then taxpayers everywhere have to pay for the actual cost of the projects that land federal funding. That's a triple insult. If Congress won't close the "March Madness" loophole as part of its ethics reform package, it will be hard to take Democratic concern about ethics reform seriously.

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Senator Tom Coburn's activity on the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security

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