Senate Joins House to Cut the Secrecy That Hides Congressional Earmarks
By JEFFREY BRAINARD
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 17, 2007
Washington
The U.S. Senate voted unanimously on Tuesday to disclose more information about the intended recipients and purpose of earmarks, approving language that closely matched rules adopted this month by the House of Representatives. Lawmakers said the changes might cut down on the overall number of earmarks, but some observers in academe said they doubted that.
The wording was approved in two separate votes, each 98 to 0, on amendments to an underlying bill (S 1) that the Senate is expected to approve this week.
Neither the Senate nor the House legislation would require any reduction in the number of or amount spent on earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive grants directed by legislators to favored constituents, including colleges and universities. Some lawmakers said that shining a light on the practice might accomplish that goal, by allowing members to debate projects of dubious quality.
With the aid of that sunshine, said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, "I think this is a problem that can correct itself."
Greater transparency alone, however, is probably "meaningless" as a deterrent to the many members of Congress who have boasted about their ability to bring home the bacon to constituents, said James D. Savage, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia who criticizes academic earmarks. A more effective check on earmarking, Mr. Savage said, is likely to be the Democrats' desire to reduce the federal deficit while continuing to finance major costs like the war in Iraq.
The Senate action started as part of an effort by the new Democratic majority in Congress to clean up problems with ethics and lobbying, including the explosive growth in earmarks.
The effort appeared to be derailed last week, when a Republican senator, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, criticized a Democratic proposal as not providing enough transparency for earmarks. He later offered a substitute that the majority leader, Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, initially resisted but eventually accepted.
Critics of earmarks have decried the projects they support as the beneficiaries of pork-barrel spending without merit, while defenders have said they are the only way to give some promising ideas a jump-start. More than 700 colleges received a total of $2-billion in earmarks for research, construction, and other campus projects in 2003, the last year for which The Chronicle compiled a grand total.
In past years' appropriations bills, Congress often identified specific universities to receive earmarks. But some bills, especially the one for the Defense Department, provided hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of earmarks for scores of projects with obscure titles -- like "Large Area, APVT Materials for Hi-Powered Devices" -- without identifying the intended recipients, some of which were universities. And in all bills, the Congressional sponsors of individual earmarks were never identified.
Under the legislation in both chambers, the Senate and House would now be required to list the earmarks appearing in all spending bills or the accompanying reports, which Appropriations Committees write to explain their intentions about how federal agencies should spend the money provided by the bills. For each earmark, the Senate would publicly disclose the legislator who requested it, the intended recipient, and the purpose.
The Senate's version of the legislation would go a step further than the House's by placing that information in a searchable database on the Internet.
(Both the Senate's and House's actions regarding earmarks were worded as modifications of each chamber's standing rules. The underlying Senate bill contains other new restrictions on lobbying that would amend existing law, and the House is expected to consider those changes in another bill this year.)
Some college officials have said they have little to fear from greater transparency on earmarks.
"Bring on all the scrutiny you want, we're confident people will think these" projects "are worth supporting," said Van Romero, vice president for research and economic development at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The institution received $56-million in earmarked funds in 2003, more than any other college that year.
University officials who might worry that Congress will make deep cuts in pork could take some comfort from remarks on Tuesday by one of earmarking's leading practitioners, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Appropriations Committee.
As have many of his Senate colleagues in the past, Senator Byrd vigorously defended earmarking as an exercise of Congress's constitutional right to control spending, the power of the purse. He criticized a "headlong rush to label earmarks as the source of our budgetary woes." Rather, he said, the Bush administration's tax cuts and the war in Iraq were to blame.
Senator Byrd said, however, that he agreed that recent growth in overall earmarking was "excessive" -- spending tripled from 1994 to 2006. As a result, he said, he proposed last month a moratorium on earmarks in the 2007 fiscal year so that the practice could be made more transparent, and he said the new disclosure requirements would help accomplish that (The Chronicle, January 19).
In another change contained in both the Senate and House versions, Congress has defined what earmarks are. Lawmakers and outside observers have long debated how to craft a description that adequately encompassed the many ways in which members try to help constituents.
The new definition, which is a mouthful, reads: "The term 'congressional earmark' means a provision or report language included primarily at the request of a member, delegate, resident commissioner, or senator providing, authorizing or recommending a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, credit authority, or other spending authority for a contract, loan, loan guarantee, grant, loan authority, or other expenditure with or to an entity, or targeted to a specific state, locality or congressional district, other than through a statutory or administrative formula-driven or competitive award process."
