Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.
KM: On the flight in this week, it just happened that sitting next to me was Gary Hart. We were having a kind of generational talk about Washington. And one of the things he pointed out that was wrong with Washington was earmarks. He said Republicans and Democrats had both been poisoned by earmarks.
House Republicans have so thoroughly stacked the earmarking deck in their favor in appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal year that the top Democratic recipient doesn’t even appear in the top 60 among lawmakers in that chamber.
In their first year in the majority since Congress in 2021 brought back the practice Republicans banned a decade earlier, GOP lawmakers are spreading nearly $7.4 billion among 4,714 individual projects tucked inside the fiscal 2024 appropriations bills.
While Democrats requested 65 percent of those earmarks, they are receiving less than 38 percent of the dollars at nearly $2.8 billion, a CQ Roll Call analysis found.
Republicans argue that’s only fair; Democrats gave themselves roughly the same percentage when they were in charge. But Democrats allowed Republicans the largest individual hauls in that chamber last year, and eight out of the top 10 earmarkers in initial fiscal 2023 bills were GOP members.
Higher education has been a top beneficiary of earmarks, which returned in 2021 after Democrats reversed a decade-long ban and made several reforms to the process. Earmarks, which have been renamed “congressionally directed spending” in the Senate and “community project funding” in the House of Representatives, send federal funds for specific projects to lawmakers’ districts and states.
“We needed a shot in the arm,” said Dannel Malloy, chancellor of the University of Maine System. “This is allowing that to happen.”
Of the more than 500 institutions that requested and received earmarks, the system had the most projects funded, which ranged from $17,000 to $8 million, according to an analysis of an Inside Higher Ed database of earmarks in the federal budget. The system’s use of earmarks is similar to how other institutions have used this process—to advance strategic goals, repair facilities and address challenges in their communities.
Directed spending is not deficit spending. Directed spending falls within the topline spending targets set by the budget committees each year and is just another means by which Congre decides its yearly spending priorities. In FY22, it accounted for less than 1 percent of discretionary spending or less than 0.3 percent of all federal spending. This constitutes only about a third as much directed spending as compared to the period before the earmark moratorium was imposed in 2011.
Under new reforms first recommended by the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, members must provide evidence of community support in their spending requests. Moreover, one key reform bans any funding for private entities. This helps ensure requests are truly needed within the district and has shifted directed spending decisions away from the defense industry and toward local needs like transportation, health care, and education. In fact, according to the General Accountability Office, 77 percent of all directed spending projects for FY22 went to state and local government, other non-profits and educational organizations.
Lastly, the public has never had a clearer view of how Congress makes directed spending decisions. The GAO is tasked with tracking direct spending to ensure funds are spent according to the will of Congress. All proposed spending must be posted on members’ websites while the Appropriations Committee maintains on its website one central repository of requested and approved spending for the entire House. The GAO has also created “Tracking the Funds” which goes further in-depth in analyzing directed spending.
This decision to continue to forswear earmarks looks myopic, according to a recent analysis by Professor Andrew Sidman of John Jay College. His Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era (Columbia) shows how both political parties can benefit from giving individual legislators more power to direct spending.
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Sidman crunched data from various sources (e.g., the Federal Assistance Awards Data System, the American National Election Studies, DW-Nominate, etc.) over a period of rising polarization (1983 to 2012). He also analyzed public works spending and elections results from 1876 through 2012. The aim is to see, as the book’s title indicates, how pork barrel spending affects reelection.
The top-line results are intriguing. “When polarization is high, incumbents benefit from securing pork consistent with the ideological preferences of their party’s base voters and pay electoral costs for securing pork inconsistent with these preferences.” Democrats benefit from dishing out formula grants, project grants, and direct payments. Republicans fend off challengers with loan and insurance programs. Woe to the elected official who sends home the wrong sort of bacon, as he or she may well find themselves with a competent, well-financed challenger. The results, it is worth mentioning, are consistent with previously published survey research.
But when it comes to “defense pork,” Sidman finds a different trend. Democrats and Republicans alike pursue it whether they are polarized or not. In fact, highly polarized legislators distribute military-related benefits for the home districts all the more. It is no accident that the National Defense Authorization Act, which benefits just about every district in the nation, has sailed through enactment annually for six consecutive decades. Rare is the legislator who stands up and declares, “My district really does not need this military base,” or “My home state refuses to partake of this wasteful weapons-building contract.” On the contrary, they tend to boast about the defense dollars they bring home. That Congress had to establish BRAC commissions and special fast-track voting procedures to enable its members to find ways to trim unneeded military facilities only goes to underscore the electoral potency of congressionally directed defense expenditures.
J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican House speaker in history, was swept from leadership in 2006 on a wave of Republican revulsion over what critics saw as a legislative favor factory he presided over in Congress. That wave deposited him on K Street, a prime address for the capital’s lobbyists, where his influence and good name kept the favors flowing — including into his bank accounts.
Federal law enforcement agents say Mr. Hastert’s years as a lobbyist and rainmaker explain how he was able to promise $3.5 million in cash to a former student who claims Mr. Hastert sexually molested him decades ago.
A former wrestling coach and high school teacher, Mr. Hastert did not enter Congress as wealthy as some of his colleagues. Yet he was still able to amass a small fortune with land deals, one aided by an earmark he secured for a highway interchange.
But it was at his own post-Congress lobbying firm and at the professional services firm Dickstein Shapiro that Mr. Hastert swelled his cash flow, working all sides of issues and glad-handing members of Congress for controversial clients.
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From 2011 to 2014, Lorillard Tobacco paid Dickstein Shapiro nearly $8 million to lobby for the benefit of candy-flavored tobacco and electronic cigarettes, and Mr. Hastert was the most prominent member of the lobbying team.
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The Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group, labeled Mr. Hastert “the eclectic lobbyist.”
Flavored tobacco products are marketed worldwide (see the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org). A 2007 World Health Organization (WHO) report1states, “In view of the little research that has been conducted on flavoured tobacco, the WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation . . . urges health authorities to consider public health initiatives to reduce the marketing and use of flavoured tobacco products.”
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reports, “Almost 90 percent of adult smokers start smoking as teenagers. . . . flavored cigarettes are a gateway for many children and young adults to become regular smokers.”2
Promises of special projects in the home district — a bridge here, a road there — no longer exist as an enticement. Pledges of fundraising help often draw little interest in the age of super PACs, which can deliver huge sums to a favored campaign on a moment’s notice. [Strictly speaking, the Super PAC money goes to independent expenditures, not the candidate's own campaign.] Personal pleas for fealty to party leaders fall on deaf ears among a new generation of conservatives who often prefer to be more closely allied with external movement leaders than with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
All these complicating factors were on full display this week as more than 60 Republicans opposed the House leaders, joining Democrats to defeat a five-year farm bill. The bill was crafted to address the conservative ethos that now controls the caucus. It cut food-stamp programs and eliminated some cash payments to farmers. But for most of those Republicans, it wasn’t conservative enough, and they were willing to let it die.
Back-bench freshmen Justin Amash, Tim Huelskamp and David Schweikert are gaining martyr status among conservative activists after they were “purged” from House committees for what they say is a matter of sticking to their principles on tough votes.
But some of their colleagues say the trio got yanked by the leadership-driven Republican Steering Committee because they’re jerks — or worse.
In an interview with POLITICO, one member of the Steering Committee called them “the most egregious assholes” in the House Republican Conference.
The argument: This went beyond voting records. The members who were booted made life harder for other Republicans by taking whacks at them in public for supporting the team, according to Republican sources familiar with the Steering Committee’s decision. ...
The fight has obscured an important shift in insider House politics, as these were the first members pulled off committees as punishment for political or personality reasons in nearly two decades. Even Tom DeLay, the fearsome majority leader known for hardball tactics, drew the line there.
By exacting retribution, party leaders sent a strong message to the Republican rank and file that they won’t tolerate members of the conference attacking each other in public. That’s a welcome message for some lawmakers who had urged leaders to attach consequences to working against the goals of the party. ... Part of the reason for the talk of stripping committee assignments is that earmarks have been banned. Without that carrot, the stick of conditional committee service has been an increasingly appealing tool to foster unity.
“The guys who are taking heat for taking tough votes back home don’t understand why there aren’t consequences for people who don’t do the same thing,” explained one leadership aide.
Roll Call reports on a meeting of the conservative Republican Study Committee:
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, a staunch conservative who sits on the Republican Steering Committee that made the decision to remove the lawmakers, said he became increasingly angry while listening to the discussion and ended up providing the most detailed defense yet for the decisions.
“I couldn’t help but kind of speak up for the steering committee and the leadership,” he told CQ Roll Call in a phone interview after the meeting.
“What I tried to explain to them was, it didn’t have anything to do with your voting record, a scorecard, your work across the street or anything else. It had to do with your ability to work within the system and to try to work. And to be, I guess, constructive in things. And I said, ‘I guess you could say it was an asshole factor,’” Westmoreland said. “Now I wasn’t calling any member in particular an asshole, I was just trying to describe an environment where some people that you’re trying to work with, they just don’t want to work within the system.”
Ending earmarks has become the mantra for making all things right in Washington. Why not? Critics have pointed to Alaska's bridge to nowhere, a teapot museum, and an opera house upgrade as recent examples of reckless spending in Washington. In that vein, criticisms are more than justified and long overdue.
But here's the catch: All earmarks are cast in the same light.
A case in point is the We the People program conducted by the nonprofit Center for Civic Education. For a quarter-century, the program has helped educators work with school children on portfolio-based curricula that promote civic engagement and the practice of democracy.
The idea is that by teaching students about the public policy process, students can better understand the system and their role in it. During the current fiscal year, the center has received $26.5 million from Congress to carry out this work. (Full disclosure: For the past decade I have had the privilege of working with educators who use We the People in their classes.)
Over the past quarter-century, 30 million students from elementary schools through college have participated in these group projects. In some instances, their proposals have been adopted by state or local legislators as public policies. A few years ago, for example, the California Legislature changed the voter registration process as a result of the recommendations from a class doing Project Citizen, a We the People application.
As an "earmark," this program now faces the loss of federal funding and possible extinction.
In our chapter on Congress, we discuss targeted expenditures, or earmarks. In his weekly address, the president promised to veto any bill that contains earmarks:
But as Eliza Newlin Carney writes at National Journal, earmarks have sometimes served a purpose in the legislative process:
As House conservatives push for ever-deeper spending cuts, a tough question confronts GOP leaders: What sweetener will convince their rank and file to swallow bitter budget medicine?
In the past, that sweetener would have been earmarks, the local pork barrel projects that lawmakers could trumpet to constituents back home. Now earmarks are gone, or at least drastically curtailed, banished first by Republicans and more recently by President Obama and Senate Democrats.
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“You need certain tools to make legislation flow, and this was a great tool,” said former Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y., now a government affairs counselor at the law firm of K&L Gates. Walsh should know: He served 16 years on the House Appropriations Committee and chaired four Appropriations subcommittees while on Capitol Hill. Earmarks “always get criticized,” Walsh added. “But if you’re in the room making sausage, you need to round up votes.”
Indeed, research suggests that “when members get an earmark, they are more likely to vote for the appropriations bill,” said Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut and author of “Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress.”
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For some lobbying firms that helped create the earmarks boom, such as Cassidy & Associates, the moratorium already represents the end of an era. The firm has lost its chief executive and let go of some 20 percent of its staff amid a restructuring.
But lobbyists aren’t the only ones disappointed to see earmarks go. Many lawmakers have supported the ban only very reluctantly. GOP House leaders, in particular, might soon wish they had a few more carrots to hand out with their budget sticks. Said Evans: “I don’t think we’re going to see an end of targeted expenditures.”
In our chapter on Congress (p. 410), we discuss earmarks, legislative directives setting aside funds for a specific purpose in a district or state. They have become controversial in recent years. The House has put a moratorium on them, while the Senate has not. The Naples [Florida] Daily News reports:
Earmarks are expenditures aimed at projects that are local in nature, and are usually specific to a Congressional district, said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The debate about whether earmarks should be allowed is a constant one, but MacManus said the decision to ban earmarks – even if only for a short time – has the most significant effect on local governments.
“Local governments are most stressed,” she said. “Local governments have been dependent on the money flowing down, and (the freeze) has a chain effect and the chain stops at the local level.”
Collier County is asking for federal dollars in fiscal 2012 for nine projects, seven of which are continuing initiatives. The county has said the Everglades Boulevard interchange, which comes with a $4 million request for federal funding, is the most important project in the coming fiscal year.
The project had $1 million earmarked in a fiscal 2011 Senate transportation bill, but Wight in a Jan. 11 memo said the earmark was in jeopardy after Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill.
“I think you probably read, and are probably well aware, of the earmark situation,” [county official Debbie] Wight said. “Our lobbyist has continued to emphasize that even though that is the current political climate … there’s a variety of other avenues to pursue funding for our projects.”
But Seana Segrue, a professor of political science at Ave Maria University, said there are only a limited number of areas in which the federal government has committed to offering grants.
“The freeze on earmarks is something that is a reflection of concerns of the debt and the desire to keep government spending under control,” she said. “Earmarks are discretionary, and it’s one of the areas you can have some cuts in tough times.”
In chapter 13, we discuss earmarks, provisions of spending bills that set aside funds for a specific purpose in a district or state. Critics of earmarks have often said that they lack transparency, so it is difficult to deliberate about them. Reforms have met only partial success. The Hill reports:
Both senators and House members listed their earmark requests on their web sites this year. But even that decision was made without much of Obama's input. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said in January they would require that earmark requests be posted online.
Even with the online postings, the requests aren't easily accessed or sorted, and the earmarks actually awarded are still tucked into the text of legislation that usually isn't released until hours before congressional markups on the bills. That makes it makes it difficult for the public to track earmarks and for lawmakers to hold hearings scrutinizing them, which Obama hoped would happen, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
"It's almost impossible to have hearings on them because you don't see the bill until they're voting on it," Ellis said.
