Local earmarking is controversial but legislators say the state benefits
Alabamians in Congress adept at securing cash
By MARY ORNDORFF News Washington correspondent
The Birmingham News (Alabama)
March 26, 2006
WASHINGTON - The number of community projects in Alabama financed by federal tax dollars has increased 16-fold in the past decade, part of the increasingly aggressive effort by members of Congress to steer ever-larger chunks of the federal budget back home for local endeavors.
Last year alone, in one of the more conservative estimates, Alabama's nine-member congressional delegation landed funding for 291 special projects in Alabama, the highest total ever for the state. The $345 million spent on those projects is more than 31/2 times higher than 10 years ago.
The explosion in congressional earmarking, sometimes referred to as pork-barrel spending, is attracting widespread attention on Capitol Hill and among taxpayer watchdog groups. Last year, Congress added 14,000 projects involving roads and research, sewers and sidewalks, municipal airports and museums into a single year's budget.
In all, legislators took more than $27 billion in federal taxpayer money and did an end run on normal government spending decisions for local projects all around the country. Other estimates, with looser definitions of what constitutes a local earmark, go even higher.
Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan and nonprofit budget-watchdog group in Washington, ranked Alabama 12th in the country in terms of ''pork'' per capita. The organization uses the pejorative term intentionally, to put a stigma on a practice it believes corrupts Congress and rips off taxpayers everywhere.
''It has become a form of legalized bribery,'' said Thomas Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.
Most often, the money is quietly inserted late in the legislative process, avoiding hearings and public scrutiny.
Members of Congress who ask for the earmarks and local institutions that receive them take exception to that characterization. The projects are worthy, and the elected representatives - who are accountable to voters - are best equipped to decide where to spend federal dollars, they argue.
''Just remember when you hear the word earmark, if it's not an earmark, it's going to be a bureaucrat making the decisions for you,'' said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Vestavia Hills.
But even the founding fathers warned against congressional pork-barrel spending.
In 1796, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison about federal appropriations for post roads: ''It will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their state; and they will always get most who are meanest.''
A simmering issue
The earmark issue is a hot topic in Washington these days, with lobbyist-turned-felon Jack Abramoff's admitted abuses, and California Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham's ouster over his organized system of trading earmarks for expensive personal gifts.
Several proposed reforms are pending to curtail the practice, including President Bush's request that Congress give him a type of line-item veto, and hearings have been convened.
''We had one member of Congress, an appropriator with a crooked lobbyist, who all by themselves were able to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to a defense contractor for the most nebulous, wasteful and criminal projects,'' Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said during a hearing March 16. ''Is the system so broken, is there so little oversight that one member and one lobbyist can divert hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars - earmarked for the men and women in military and supposed to be for the military - to a corrupt enterprise?
''Everybody was so alarmed at what Congressman Cunningham did, but I think we should be alarmed that he was able to.''
Whether any of the reforms has a chance of slowing the explosion of congressional earmarking remains to be seen. But in terms of federal funding for favorite projects back home, Alabama's record has been one of increasing success.
In 1995, 17 items worth $74.2 million were earmarked for Alabama. The largest was $35 million for highway construction funded through the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Congress directs many of the agency's decisions on road projects, the most notable in Alabama being Alabama Corridor X (Interstate 22) to connect Memphis and Birmingham. Most of the rest of the projects that year were for military construction and Army Corps of Engineers work.
Back then, Alabama's ''pork'' projects averaged $4.3 million each. Fast-forward 10 years, and the list of 291 projects has grown impressively diverse in amount and nature.
There was $10,000 for the Athens City Schools Foundation for the third-grade violin music education program. At the other extreme was $35 million for the new Transportation Technology Center at Auburn University, funded through the Federal Highway Administration.
In between are dozens of cities, counties, colleges, nonprofits, police departments, social service agencies, museums, airports, water systems and roads that get a piece of the federal pie specifically with their name on it. In 2005, Alabama's average earmark was $1.1 million.
$2.2 billion in all
During the past 10 years, Citizens Against Government Waste has counted 1,435 Alabamabased projects worth more than $2.2 billion, all listed in one of the several federal spending bills that are divided by subject.
For most of the decade, four of Alabama's nine members of Congress were on the House and Senate appropriations committees: Sen. Richard Shelby, RAla.; Rep. Sonny Callahan, RMobile, who retired in 2002; Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville; and Rep. Robert Aderholt, RHaleyville. Callahan retired in 2002, and the other three remain.
A handful of the largest earmarks for Alabama are defenserelated, such as purchasing military equipment that may be made or used in Alabama by military personnel from around the world. The majority of the projects, however, are intensely local, whether in urban, hightech centers in the largest cities of in the farthest reaches of rural counties.
In 2004, $20 million was earmarked for an administrationoperations complex for the Missile Defense Agency at Redstone Arsenal, and then there was $15,000 for the Gordo Old Town Hall in 2003 from the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund, to name just two.
State-by-state lists of earmarks are available at www.cagw.org.
The most generous of the appropriations bills to Alabama has been one for transportation, treasury and housing, which included 373 Alabama projects worth more than $909 million from 1995 to 2005. These are the big-ticket road, research and building projects, many of which were inserted under the powerful hand of Shelby, who was chairman of the transportation appropriations subcommittee for several years. Traditionally, those who write the bill hold great authority over what is included and what isn't.
The public knows this because Shelby tells them when the money is secured. Before that point, the earmarking process is one that takes place largely out of the public's view.
Keeping it quiet
Members of Congress almost never release their lists of earmark requests. Those that are granted are listed in the bill or the accompanying committee report - usually a few hours before it is passed into law.
There is no public list of which requests were not funded, because that would be a scorecard that most members do not want to be graded by.
The public also never knows what may have been traded in exchange for a project's funding, such as a vote on some other issue or approval of the spending bill itself, even if it is a budget-buster loaded with thousands of slices of pork.
''It is a corrupt process whereby members are forced to vote for things they would never vote for because of one small parochial interest that is in the political best interest in the short term of that member of Congress but is in the political disinterest of this country and its future,'' said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.
But not even the harshest critics indict all earmarks as wasteful pork. They decry the system that allows it but tend to label only a handful of such funds as egregious.
McCain, for example, repeatedly has picked on the $3.5 million that Shelby set aside to renovate the Vulcan statute atop Red Mountain because it bypassed the normal review by which historic preservation programs are deemed worthy of federal support or not. More recently, a $50 million earmark for an indoor rain forest in Iowa has drawn ridicule.
There is no independent review of earmarks to determine their benefit to the national interest, ''making it impossible to distinguish between truly meritorious projects and those that are pure pork,'' said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs with the Taxpayers for Common Sense Action.
Last year, a $223 million project to link Ketchikan, Alaska, to Gravina Island, population 50,
was nicknamed the ''bridge to nowhere,'' and was withdrawn following a public outcry.
Thousands of other earmarks get no such scrutiny.
''Most members work very hard at picking things they think will benefit their community the most, but I do think the process is out of control and diminishes the integrity and effectiveness of Congress and the entire federal government,'' said Scott Lilly, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
One subcommittee, for example, received 15,000 requests for earmarks, he said. At one request per sheet, that would amount to a 10-foot stack of paper.
A local grant becomes an earmark when a federal agency that normally uses a competitive or peer-review process to decide which local projects to fund is circumvented by the spending law.
For years, Shelby has said such decisions are better left to elected officials and that he is proud to be a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where those decisions are made.
''I do everything I can . . . to help our people help themselves,'' Shelby recently said.
