Spending bill swells on diet of pork
Tue Jan 20,10:46 AM ET Add Top Stories - Chicago Tribune to My Yahoo!
By Mike Dorning Washington Bureau
Creating a rain forest on a snow-swept Midwestern plain might seem like an impossible dream. But it's a lot easier when Congress is willing to throw in $50 million of taxpayers' money.
The 4.5-acre man-made jungle in Iowa is just one of 7,931 pork-barrel projects that would cost taxpayers $10.7 billion in a catchall spending package the Senate is expected to consider Tuesday.
The often-idiosyncratic grab bag of gifts for lawmakers' home districts contains everything from a grant to a ballet school in Philadelphia to construction of a municipal swimming pool for Salinas, Calif. There is even a $500,000 subsidy for a trolley bus line running from hotels in Anaheim to Disneyland.
"Mickey Mouse ought to be able to pay his own bus fare," fumes Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which catalogued each congressionally mandated project or earmark in the 1,182-page legislation.
Congress usually approves such massive spending packages swiftly, before citizens groups and even most of its own members have a chance to examine the legislation for controversial spending.
But this year, because of a procedural snag, there has been a six-week lapse between House approval Dec. 8 and the Senate's consideration.
That has given the opposition time to gel. With farm groups and labor unions angered by provisions in the legislation on food labeling and overtime pay--and some fiscal conservatives discontented by spending levels and the pork--the legislation faces an unusually close vote on Tuesday as Senate leaders try to muster 60 votes to cut off a filibuster.
If the filibuster succeeds, it would be an embarrassment for President Bush (news - web sites) and Congress' Republican leaders. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has defended the spending bill as "a titanic achievement in fiscal restraint" because it holds growth in discretionary spending to 3 percent.
The legislation provides $328 billion in discretionary spending for 2004, but the bill's total expenditures come to $822 billion when such entitlement programs as Medicare are included. Money for defense, homeland security, Iraq (news - web sites) and other areas was covered in legislation that already has become law.
The fine print of the omnibus appropriations package, which covers funding for 11 Cabinet agencies, offers a glimpse of the way taxpayers' money is doled out according to the desires of individual members of Congress and the raw political power of the institution's leaders.
The rain forest, pushed into the legislation by Sen. Charles Grassley (news, bio, voting record) (R-Iowa), fulfills the vision of a well-connected group of Iowans, including a former governor and a past Republican state party chairman. Their plans for the federal money include a 20-story translucent dome and a million-gallon aquarium on vacant land in an industrial park in Coralville.
Deficit ballooning
Despite the ballooning budget deficit and control of Congress by Republicans, who wrested power from Democrats in part through attacks on pork-barrel spending, the number of congressionally mandated programs has been rapidly escalating in the past few years.
"Pork has always been a problem in Washington, but it's on a scale it has never been before," said Rep. Jeff Flake (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ariz.), one of only a handful of Republicans to vote against the spending bill in the House.
The value of grants directed to specific universities and research institutions by Congress has grown 32 percent in the past year, to $1.9 billion in 2004 across the federal budget, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites).
The earmarks steer research to favored institutions in the home districts of individual members, bypassing the traditional peer-review system designed to assure funding goes to the best-qualified researchers.
At the University of Virginia, faculty members have been approached in recent years by lobbyists boasting of their ability to arrange congressional earmarks for the professors' research proposals or new laboratories for scientists, said James Savage, the university's vice president for research and federal relations. Savage said the offers were declined.
"There's simply no accountability for these projects. What are they going to accomplish? What are the results?" he said.
Not all of the home-state projects that Congress chooses to fund are boondoggles. In many cases, they reflect key needs.
There is a long history of Congress allocating a considerable portion of federal transportation spending by individual project. In the Chicago area, the spending bill includes federal assistance for an expansion of Metra commuter rail service and the ongoing renovation of the Chicago Transit Authority's Douglas branch of the Blue line.
But need can lie in the eye of the beholder. Grassley defended the rain forest plan as a "non-profit green construction project" that "is forward-looking and provides educational and economic opportunities for Iowa."
Because legislation is shaped by the power and preferences of individual lawmakers and often-partisan political calculations, congressional earmarks foster disparities in funding. Social programs, which a decade ago included few earmarks, are beginning to reflect those disparities.
584 projects in Pennsylvania
In the section of the legislation devoted to health, education and human services programs, 584 projects are singled out for favored treatment in just one state, representing one-fifth of all the projects for that category of spending, according to the tabulation by Taxpayers for Common Sense.
That state, Pennsylvania, is represented by Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), who is chairman of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over such domestic social spending-- and who faces a tough re-election fight this year.
In Illinois, Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's relatively affluent district is to receive $17 million earmarked for 18 projects in the same category of social spending-- almost half the money earmarked to the state in that category.
Meanwhile, the congressional district on Chicago's South Side and south suburbs represented by Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr. receives only $900,000. One library in Hastert's district received more in earmarked spending: the Plano Community Library, located near Hastert's home, which has an appropriation of $977,000 toward the cost of an addition.
Because House Democrats complained that proposed social spending levels were too low and voted en masse against the Republican-drafted plan, House GOP leaders denied most requests for earmarked spending in the category for Democratic districts.
Defending the projects for the speaker's district, Hastert spokesman John Feehery said, "The reason his constituents send him to Congress is to help with things like education and health care. He's representing his constituents and doing a good job of it."
The allocation of money to members' projects also reflects the electioneering of congressional leaders. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ill.) said when he planned to run for re-election, party leaders gave him "the strong impression" that his allocation "would have been much greater than usual."
But once he chose not to run, the amount that he had to distribute in Illinois was "greatly reduced," he said.
Sen. Fitzgerald objects
The discretion given to individual members in selecting projects for funding also presents opportunity for conflicts of interest, Fitzgerald noted.
In one case, Fitzgerald said, a lobbyist waited only a half-hour after meeting with him to seek help obtaining an earmark in a spending bill before phoning Fitzgerald's campaign committee with his own offer of assistance: a proposal to host a fundraiser for the senator's re-election.
Fitzgerald declined to identify the lobbyist but said he refused the fundraiser and chose not to support the project.
"I found the whole appropriations process depressing," he said. |
