Maybe you are knowledgeable enough to know what every single 'earmark' is for, but I'm not.
I don't need to know. I don't care. Earmarks as a class are bad. Period. Earmarks are extra-budget pork dispensers. That is their purpose. Pork is bad, ergo earmarks, as their budget mechanism, are bad.
If you have some legitimate objective, you put funding in the budget for it. The agency then determines how to accomplish that objective. That may be by contracting for it, staffing up for it, building a central facility for it, giving grants to the states for it, whatever. That's normal budgeting.
If Congress, OTOH, votes that it will be accomplished by building a facility somewhere in the boonies named after some congressman, they earmark money for that facility in that place with that name. Thus the agency is deprived of the opportunity to determine how best to achieve the objective. The agency is tied to building that facility no matter what. There could be a flood destroying the city where the facility was to be built or its airport could be abandoned by commercial service rendering the facility useless but the agency would still be obliged to build the facility there because it's an earmark. That money can't be diverted to any other purpose. That's an extreme example to distinguish between normal budgeting and earmarks.
Some folks are talking about cleaning up the earmarks snuck in during conference, the most abusive earmarks. That's too narrow a focus IMO. |
