By John Lancaster Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 5, 2001; Page A01
Despite new spending curbs linked to President Bush's tax cut, lawmakers are seeking billions of dollars for individual projects in their home districts, causing tension between the Bush administration and its allies on Capitol Hill.
According to figures compiled by congressional staff, House members have requested 18,898 "earmarks" -- targeted expenditures for home-district projects such as highways, dams, parks and museums -- in the spending bills making their way through Congress. If all were approved, the cost would amount to $279 billion -- almost the size of the Pentagon's annual budget.
Taking care of the folks back home by means of the appropriations process is hardly a new phenomenon in Congress. Nor is frustration on the part of the executive branch, which prefers to make spending decisions on its own. But as the number of earmarks has increased sharply in recent years, rising more than threefold since Republicans won control of Congress in 1995, some say the practice has spun out of control.
Chief among them is White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., who has launched what one senior House staffer describes as a "jihad" against thousands of proposed earmarks in the 13 annual spending bills that Congress will pass by year's end. In many cases, Daniels says, such targeted expenditures steal resources from more deserving uses, undercut states' authority to determine their own needs and ultimately increase pressure on government to spend beyond its means.
"They're sort of a natural, traditional part of the process, but it's gotten out of hand," Daniels said in an interview, adding, "In all honesty, I don't think we've had much success so far" in curbing the congressional appetite for earmarks.
Ideology plays little role in the debate. In pushing his tax cut, Bush had no stronger ally than Rep. Tom DeLay, the sharp-tongued majority whip from Sugar Land, Tex. "Republicans want you to keep more of your hard-earned money," DeLay told reporters on May 3. "The Democratic leadership wants to take away more of what you earn to pay for their big-government spending."
Last year, however, DeLay steered $2 million in federal funds to Sugar Land Airport, a center for corporate jets near Houston that is in the midst of a major expansion. More recently, according to House staff, he made sure the airport was included on a list of "priority" projects in the annual transportation spending bill passed by the House last week.
Bush's tax cut is based on the assumption that government spending will not increase by more than 4 percent a year. Lawmakers are already chafing under that limit: On Thursday, the House passed a $23.7 billion natural resources spending bill that bumps up the president's request by $1.2 billion -- much of it designated for water projects and beach restoration. The competition for resources will only intensify later this year when Congress and the administration try to fulfill their pledges for big increases in education and defense spending.
That Daniels's campaign against earmarks has brought him into conflict with GOP leaders in the House and Senate is an irony not lost on Democrats, who have often felt unfairly tarred with charges of pork-barrel profligacy.
"The Republicans . . . are not at all squeamish about taking a project that would meet minimum standards and sticking it in someplace that would be of political use for them," a senior House staffer said. "When it was the Democrats doing it, it was a terrible thing. Now it's going to protect Republican districts."
By most reckonings, the explosion of earmarks is a nonpartisan phenomenon that reflects the growth of the federal budget surplus over the last several years. It also is symptomatic of the age-old struggle between Congress and the executive branch over control of the federal purse.
Citing examples such as last year's $700,000 earmark for a jazz institute at the University of Idaho, administration officials contend that federal agencies are better suited to making judgments about individual projects because they are insulated from the demands of politics.
Lawmakers defend earmarks as an essential prerogative of their role. "The Constitution provides that the United States Congress is the appropriating agency of the federal government," Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in an interview, adding that he has had a "friendly" though inconclusive discussion with Daniels on the same subject. "Members of Congress have the right to offer recommendations to appropriations bills on how money should be spent."
Members of the appropriations committees also contend that they are more sensitive to local needs than federal bureaucrats because they spend so much time back home. Taxpayers' interests are protected, Young said, because members' requests are vetted with federal agencies and "if they come back with a very strong negative, we don't do it."
In any event, he added, House lawmakers will compensate for any additions to Bush's budget request by making cuts elsewhere. "All 13 bills which pass the House this year . . . will have been done within the budget limit" that established the foundation for Bush's tax cut, he said.
Some conservative Republicans express sympathy with the administration's crusade. Notwithstanding his efforts on behalf of Sugar Land Airport, DeLay "does agree with the president that there should not be earmarks in these appropriations bills," said his spokeswoman, Emily Miller.
But she added, "The reality is that the appropriations committees are putting earmarks in these bills, and as a member of the Appropriations Committee, he is not going to act to unilaterally disarm Houston and the district. . . . If at some point the appropriations committees and Congress can work together to stop earmarks, he would be more than happy to oblige."
The record is not encouraging in that regard. According to data compiled by the Office of Management and Budget, the number of unrequested projects in spending bills approved by Congress has risen from 1,724 in 1993 to 3,476 in 2000 to 6,454 in the current fiscal year.
Committee staff review earmark requests from members and most are rejected, sometimes because of objections by federal agencies. But many survive the vetting. By long tradition, Appropriations Committee members generally take care of their own needs first, which is why such assignments are so popular. Other earmarks are doled out at the request of House leaders on behalf of Republican members facing tough reelection fights; Democrats did the same thing when they were in power.
The Bush administration has attacked earmarks on a variety of fronts. Bush's agriculture request, for instance, knocked out $84 million in research grants that lawmakers had earmarked in the 2001 budget for universities back home. It did so, Daniels said, because "science ought to be driven by peer review and competitive processes, not by political muscle."
House appropriators restored almost all the research earmarks.
James W. Dyer, clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said that is as it should be.
"If air and oxygen is not introduced into this process, it becomes corrupt by its own nature," he said. "I will make a deal with the administration, that if they do not direct money to politically popular programs then I will not direct money to politically popular programs. . . . We are not the only ones who are picking and choosing."
In a similar vein, the House added $568 million to the president's request for the Army Corps of Engineers, whose budget is considered part of the energy and water bill. Members of the Appropriations energy and water subcommittee earmarked much of the increase for water projects, some of which the corps itself had sought to restrain.
One such project involves the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint rivers, which form a system of barge channels linking Columbus, Ga., to the Gulf of Mexico at Apalachicola Bay, Fla. The corps spends $3 million a year to dredge the rivers, killing fish and damaging mussel beds in the process, even though traffic on the system has fallen to just a few barges per week.
Last year, Joseph W. Westphal, the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, declared that keeping the rivers open for navigation "is not economically justified or environmentally defensible." The Bush administration agreed and cut the maintenance program to $1.23 million.
In June, however, members of the subcommittee earmarked $6.8 million to address the "maintenance and dredging backlog" on the river system. An Appropriations Committee staffer said the money was added "at the request of a bipartisan group of members from that area."
Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.), a member of the Appropriations Committee whose district includes the Apalachicola River and Bay, was not one of them. Speaking at the committee consideration of the energy and water bill on June 25, Boyd noted that at current levels of commercial use, the cost of maintaining the system works out to roughly $60,000 per barge trip. In the meantime, he said, natural side channels "are being destroyed" by dredging and other corps activities.
Some of those closest to the appropriations process insist that its effectiveness should not be judged on the basis of individual projects.
"There can be winners and losers, and it is a contact sport," Dyer said. "But I think both sides come out all right in the end."