July 2005
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The great American pork barrel:
Washington streamlines the means of corruption
How the $16 billion was absconded with we will never entirely know, at least not in all the particulars. What we do know is this: At approximately 2:00 P.M. last November 17, a Wednesday, a small group of senators and representatives from the congressional appropriations committees gathered in a meeting room under the Capitol dome, where they were to finalize one of thirteen bills that fund the annual affairs of the U.S. government. According to eyewitnesses, only a few members made statements about the bill in question—the Foreign Operations bill, which pays for everything from the Peace Corps to the aerial fumigation of Colombian coca. The only notable break from protocol was made by Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who delivered an impromptu speech in praise of the women of Congress; the senator was particularly fulsome in regard to Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, of whom he remarked that he “would have fallen in love with her” had he met her earlier in life. The meeting ended less than half an hour after it began, as this very straightforward piece of legislation was approved by the conferees.
Over the next seventy-two hours, by way of meetings and measures obscured from the public, this simple bill would undergo a startling metastasis. Because Congress had failed, for the third year in a row, to pass most of the bills that keep the government running, members of the appropriations committees folded eight as yet unapproved bills—those that fund the Departments of Justice, State, Energy, Labor, Commerce, Education, Agriculture, Transportation, the Treasury, the Interior, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the entire legislative and judiciary branches—into the Foreign Operations bill. Even to assemble the text of the resulting piece of legislation, called an omnibus appropriations bill, was an epic task. Teams of staffers labored long into the night to edit the various bills that would be folded in, after which the mass of pages was fed through copier machines across Capitol Hill. There was no time to produce a clean copy, so the version of the omnibus bill that Congress voted on was a fourteen-inch-thick clump of papers with corrections, deletions, and additions on virtually every page. Handwritten notes peppered the margins; typefaces varied from section to section and from paragraph to paragraph. First made available to lawmakers at around 12:15 A.M. on November 20 (and only to those who happened to be browsing the House Rules Committee website, where it was posted), the omnibus bill came to a vote before the full House some sixteen hours later, at approximately 4:00 that afternoon, and before the Senate at 8:42 that evening. For the legislators who approved it—by a margin of 344‒51 in the House and 65‒30 in the Senate—reading the 3,320-page bill before the vote would have been a mathematical impossibility.
Only later, after the approved bill had been shuffled off to the President for signature, could lawmakers and laymen alike peruse its contents in earnest. Scattered throughout the bill were hundreds of hastily inserted pages of “earmarks,” or allocations for local projects that are tucked into federal budgets. As approved at the November 17 appropriations meeting, the Foreign Operations bill had contained a mere nine earmarks. The omnibus measure, which was completed after two feverish days of work, allocated money for 11,772 separate earmarks. There was $100,000 for goat-meat research in Texas, $549,000 for “Future Foods” development in Illinois, $569,000 for “Cool Season Legume Research” in Idaho and Washington, $63,000 for a program to combat noxious weeds in the desert Southwest, $175,000 for obesity research in Texas. In the end, the bill's earmarks were worth a combined total of nearly $16 billion—a figure almost as large as the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture and roughly twice that of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the biggest single piece of pork-barrel legislation in American history.
Of who added these grants, no public record exists. Except in rare cases, members of Congress will refuse to discuss their involvement in establishing earmarks, and the appropriations committees have a blanket rule against commenting. Often it is difficult to discern even who is receiving the funds: earmarks are itemized in bills but generally without disclosure of the direct recipient—just a dollar amount, destination, and broad purpose. Indeed, in the matter of the $16 billion burglary, and the similar acts of mass theft plotted for this year, the only certainty seems to be this: that lawmakers and lobbyists collude to conceal, to the utmost extent possible, their actions from the American taxpayer, who serves as the ultimate benefactor to their chronic bouts of generosity.
Pork-barreling” as a legislative epithet is a pre‒Civil War coinage that referred to the custom of handing out salt pork to slaves, who would crowd around the barrels that held it; and indeed, members of Congress have raided the federal treasury for home-district boondoggles ever since the earliest days of the republic. By 1822, President James Monroe warned that financial support from Washington should henceforth be granted “to great national works only, since if it were unlimited it would be liable to abuse and might be productive of evil.” The pork barrel was to become as central to our national political culture as the gerrymander or the filibuster; it has long been a foregone conclusion that whenever the federal government builds a road, or erects a dam, or constructs a power plant, members of Congress will artfully pad the bill with hometown “pork.”
In the past two decades, though, the pastime has become breathtaking in its profligacy. Even as the federal deficit soars to record heights, the sums of money being diverted from the treasury have grown ever larger. Last year, 15,584 separate earmarks worth a combined $32.7 billion were attached to appropriations bills—more than twice the dollar amount in 2001, when 7,803 earmarks accounted for $15 billion; and more than three times the amount in 1998, when roughly 2,000 earmarks totaled $10.6 billion. To be sure, not every project that receives an earmark is an utter waste of money. Such appropriations can fund after-school programs, park conservation, public health. “What some people call ‘pork’ may be as essential as a lock on a dam that creates hydropower, or [support for] a bridge, road, or other critical infrastructure,” said Zack Wamp, a Tennessee Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. “Sometimes we have to direct spending because the executive branch is not doing its job.”
But the process is so willfully murky that abuse has become not the exception but the rule. Earmarks are added anonymously, frequently during last-minute, closed-door sessions of the appropriations committees. An especially attractive feature for those private interests seeking earmarks is that they are awarded on a noncompetitive basis and recipients need not meet any performance standards. In other words, applicants need not demonstrate that their project, program, or company actually delivers a useful good or service.
Although there are a number of legislative instruments that moneyed interests can use to raid the federal treasury, appropriations bills have become the vehicle of choice, both because they are regularly scheduled—they must be passed, or else the government shuts down—and because their staggering size and scope deter public scrutiny of individual line items. Unsurprisingly, seats on the appropriations committees are among the most desirable sinecures in Congress. Of the sixty-six seats on the House committee (thirty-seven Republican, twenty-nine Democrat), twenty-eight are held by members from the electoral-rich states of California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. On the Senate committee (where Republicans hold a 15‒13 advantage) sit many of the most influential members of the upper chamber: Republicans Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Pete Domenici of New Mexico, along with Democrats Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Dianne Feinstein of California.
That appropriations bills have emerged as the premier venue for private interests also owes something to Tom DeLay, the embattled House majority leader. Traditionally, seats on the appropriations committee had been granted on the basis of seniority; but when the GOP won control of the House in 1994, DeLay (who himself served on the appropriations committee between 1987 and 2003) helped craft a new strategy under which the Republican seats were, as circumstances required, strategically assigned to “at risk” members; i.e., to those who had narrowly won office. This lent wobbly new lawmakers two vital assets: first, the ability to direct pork projects to their home districts, thereby impressing constituents with their ability to bring home federal monies; second, a fail-safe method of filling campaign war chests—namely, by tapping earmark seekers for donations.
The strategy has been eminently successful, as seen in the case of Anne Northup, a Republican from Kentucky who first won office in 1996 when she squeaked past a Democratic candidate by 1,299 votes. It was the first time in nearly three decades that a Republican had represented Kentucky's Third District, which encompasses the Democratic stronghold of Louisville. Northup was deemed to be highly vulnerable, but she was immediately assigned a slot on the appropriations committee and has held the seat ever since. In 1998, the first year she ran for reelection, Northup raised $1.9 million and won with 51.5 percent of the vote. By last November, Northup was vice-chair of one of the major pork-dispensing subcommittees—Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education—and Louisville was, not by coincidence, receiving more earmarked funds than the entire state of Delaware or Nebraska, states with no representation on the appropriations committees. Having raised $3.3 million, Northup sailed to reelection 60 percent of the vote.
As earmarking has proliferated, it has become less ad hoc and more efficient; it is now an accepted Washington industry, with its own standardized rules and procedures. Whereas in the past we had isolated thefts on behalf of constituents, what we have today is a professional crime syndicate with tentacles not only in long-established pork-barrel sectors such as public works and defense but in such relatively unspoiled fields as academic research and community programs. Those seeking government largesse no longer need to procure backroom meetings through congressional aides; most members of Congress now have simple “appropriations-request forms,” which are as easy to complete as a typical job or credit-card application. The form for the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (which is similar to the other forms I've seen) asks earmark seekers for the name of the individual making the request, a letter from that person, a description of the project, the amount sought, a budget, and the specific appropriations bill to which the request should be attached. “Multiple requests . . . must be ranked in priority,” reads the instruction sheet.
By far the most significant change of recent years has been the incursion of lobbying firms, many of which have been set up expressly for this purpose. Like attorneys at hospital bedsides, earmarking lobbyists aggressively court customers with boasts of their ability to deliver easy cash. “Shepherding appropriations requests through Congress is a priority for many clients,” trumpets the website of B&D Sagamore, one such earmarking specialist. B&D's site furthermore promises to arrange “discussions between clients and members of Congress” and track legislation so that the firm can intervene “at critical points in the process.”
Last year more than 3,000 private companies or institutions hired lobbying firms such as B&D to pursue earmarks. Because federal disclosure laws are minimal, to say the least, it is difficult to estimate exactly how much money in total was doled out to lobbyists. But Keith Ashdown, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington group that tracks the earmarking process, says the typical earmark seeker pays a retainer ranging from the tens of thousands up to more than $100,000 per year, with the total easily reaching tens of millions of dollars. Large though that sum may seem, as investments such retainers are undeniably savvy: the overall payout in pork is many times that, totaling into the billions.
For the aspiring pork recipient, mastering the appropriations process is hardly a difficult task. First, one needs simply to identify the correct member of Congress to approach with one's request. Almost always this will be a member whose district or state is home to the company or entity that will receive the money. Mark McIntyre, an appropriations lobbyist at the Russ Reid Company, wrote a 2003 how-to guide to appropriations for a web publication called OnPhilanthropy, in which he said that lining up the best congressional “champion” often means the difference between success and failure. “It is extremely helpful,” McIntyre pointedly noted, “if your U.S. Representative or one of your U.S. Senators serves on the Appropriations Committee.”
Helpful indeed, as seen in the case of Ted Stevens, the senior senator from Alaska and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2004. Last year's vast omnibus bill contained hundreds of earmarks for Alaska, including grants for projects on seafood waste ($160,000), salmon quality standards ($167,000), and alternative salmon products ($1.1 million, of which $443,000 was specifically set aside for the “development of baby food containing salmon”). Alaska's total haul came to $2,211.07 per capita, about twenty-two times the national average.
Mississippi, home of Senator Thad Cochran, the new chairman, also happens to be a leading recipient of appropriations bounty. Grants to his state last year included $900,000 for “cattle and nutrient management in stream crossings,” $248,000 for a study to prevent the spread of cogon grass, and $2.6 million for—the surest of sure bets—Mississippi State University's Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park. West Virginia, home of the top Democratic appropriations mastermind, Senator Byrd, always receives ample funds as well. “You may as well slap my wife as take away my transportation funding,” Byrd once remarked. The senator's most memorable achievement was when he won a Coast Guard facility for his conspicuously landlocked state.
In recent years the most daring pursuer of earmarks has been former Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who headed the House Appropriations Committee in the late 1990s before resigning from Congress in 1999; his departure, which occurred just as he was helping to spearhead the call for Bill Clinton's impeachment, became necessary when Livingston was forced to acknowledge that he himself had “on occasion” committed the sin of adultery. Livingston's disgrace proved to be short-lived: he immediately turned to lobbying and signed up a drove of clients. Among the first of these was a Louisiana firm called JRL Enterprises, which since has had remarkable success winning earmarks for its “I CAN Learn” mathematics software. Last year's omnibus bill contained three separate earmarks for JRL—none named the company, only the software program—worth a combined $5.5 million.
For JRL to have hired Livingston in the first place was a natural move: the year before he resigned, Livingston had slipped JRL's original earmark into an appropriations bill, a $7.3 million grant that provided the then-floundering firm with virtually all of its income for 1998. Since becoming a lobbyist, Livingston has received nearly $1 million in fees from JRL, which, in turn, has since received $38 million in earmarks.
Yet there is very little (excluding JRL's own extravagant claims) to suggest that I CAN Learn significantly helps the learning of anyone at all. A story last fall in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram found that students in the local school district, which has invested heavily in I CAN Learn, weren't learning math any more successfully than students elsewhere in the state. Meanwhile, local teachers complained that the software was freezing in the middle of lessons and sometimes provided the wrong answers to test questions. Nonetheless, Congress year after year has awarded ever more money to JRL—perhaps because company executives have year after year awarded ever more money to members of the appropriations committees. Between 1999 and 2004, of JRL's $81,460 in political contributions, at least $14,500 went to appropriations members.
The link between lawmaker and earmark is virtually impossible to make definitively. A clear paper trail, however, does exist: when requesting an earmark, lawmakers must make their request in writing to the relevant appropriations committee. But because all congressional correspondence is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, would-be watchdogs—such as Ashdown's group, Taxpayers for Common Sense (which provided much of the hard data for this story)—have no way to obtain earmark requests unless they are leaked. Ashdown, whose whole job is to monitor the appropriations process, says he has never seen more than “a handful” of the official requests himself.
Sometimes, though, circumstantial evidence will allow for the construction of a probable scenario. For example, federal lobby-disclosure records show that last year the Rajant Corporation, based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, retained three lobbying shops to seek appropriations money for a defense contract. The campaign was successful; the defense appropriations bills approved in July awarded the company $2 million for the project.
Numerous clues suggested that Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania played a role in Rajant's earmark. Consider that Weldon is vice-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rajant is based in his district. Consider also that a former Weldon staffer, John McNichol, is now a lobbyist at Greenlee Partners, and was retained by Rajant to push for the earmark. And that Blank Rome, the second lobby shop on Rajant's payroll, is a major donor to Weldon; lobbyists at the firm, including two on the Rajant account, gave Weldon $9,300 between 2000 and 2004. And that Rajant's lobbyist at the third firm, David Urban of American Continental Group, is another Weldon donor.
Russ Caso, Weldon's chief of staff, confirmed that Weldon submitted an earmark request for Rajant but said a number of other congressional offices did as well. He added that the congressman's office “accepts all [earmark] requests and we have a vetting process.” Caso said that on military-related items the office checks to see whether the product is useful and “submits requests only for items that the military wants.”
Securing an earmark is never a given; only about one in four requests makes the final cut, and so steps must be taken to ensure that lawmakers are sufficiently stimulated. The most effective means is, of course, direct cash disbursements. As McIntyre forthrightly states in his how-to guide, “Money has become the oxygen supply of political campaigns. For better or for worse, perhaps the best way to show your support for a Senator or Representative is to make a campaign contribution.”
And yet direct contributions to lawmakers can get one only so far. Choosing the right lobbyist is as important as choosing the right lawmaker, if not more important. Because so many lobbyists have past experience on Capitol Hill, they usually have personal ties both to members of Congress and to their key staffers, who vet and prioritize the earmark requests. “You need to hire someone who understands the process and knows the pressure points,” says a Beltway lobbyist who specializes in winning appropriations money. “There's a lot of horse-trading going on, so you need someone who is hounding the staffers, calling up every week or every day if necessary.”
A full taxonomy of the lobbyists of Washington would necessitate a book-length field guide, but a few of the more salient species can be considered here. The most effective ally for the earmark-seeker is a lobbyist who is actually related, by blood or marriage, to a powerful member of an appropriations committee. For years many Alaskan firms, and even huge corporations such as Lockheed Martin, have retained the services of William Bittner, brother-in-law of Senator Stevens. In one case reported by the Los Angeles Times in 2003, Stevens inserted a single line into an appropriations bill that awarded $9.6 million to a program whose chief beneficiary was a Hyundai subsidiary represented by Bittner. The brother of Rep. John Murtha, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, has lobbied for at least sixteen defense manufacturers on appropriations issues. Craig Obey, the son of Rep. David Obey, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, seeks money for the National Parks & Conservation Association.
Retired members and staffers from the appropriations committees also make particularly effective lobbyists, because they enjoy guaranteed access to the friends and colleagues they left behind. Jim Dyer, who became the Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee in 1995, was long considered to be one of the most powerful aides on the Hill. “Jim's job was to broker deals between members,” a lobbyist and friend of Dyer's told me earlier this year. “He knew where every dime was. He's been hounded for years with big money offers.” In February , just weeks after we spoke, Dyer was hired by a lobby shop called Clark & Weinstock, where he joined two former appropriations committee members, Vin Weber and Vic Fazio.
Some lobbyists specialize in winning specific types of appropriations. If your seaside community wants taxpayers to pay to have its beach restored, the man to see is Howard Marlowe. He has won dozens of such earmarks, mostly for underprivileged communities like Florida's Venice and New York's Fire Island. In late October 2001, on behalf of the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association, Marlowe's firm helped prepare a letter to Congress that bemoaned the economic toll that the events of September 11 had taken on the nation. “While these financial troubles pale in comparison with the unspeakable human losses of that day, they pose a significant problem,” the letter went on. Urgent action was therefore required—specifically, lavishing money on beach communities in order to lure foreign and domestic tourists to America's shorelines. “Many national leaders have stated that increased tourism is imperative to the recovery of our economic strength,” the letter claimed.
Diane Blagman, a former staffer at the House Appropriations Committee, and currently of Greenberg Traurig, was the congressional liaison for the 9/11 Memorial Concert in Washington and serves on the board of the Grateful Dead's charitable foundation. She has become adept at winning money for her entertainment-industry clients, such as the $150,000 earmark she picked up last fall to fund the Santa Monica‒based Grammy Foundation's “educational activities.”
Van Scoyoc Associates—headed by Stu van Scoyoc, a prominent donor to politicians of both parties—specializes in winning research money for university clients. This is an especially fast-growing field: the Chronicle of Higher Education estimated that academic earmarks topped $2 billion in 2003, six times more than in 1996. James Savage, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, says academic earmarks are particularly insidious. “Academic research is supposed to be peer-reviewed, with the idea being that the best science wins out. But with earmarks, quality has nothing to do with it. Schools get research funds simply because they are in a powerful member's district or have the money to hire a lobbyist.” Savage has come across cases in which universities from different states team up to submit joint requests for earmarks, knowing that their chances for funding go up by bundling together the largest number of powerful lawmakers. Many universities, he says, have received earmarks for advanced research even though they don't have graduate-studies programs in the relevant fields.
Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates has a flourishing practice in the transportation field. One of the best-connected firms in town, Public Policy Associates' name partners are Anne Wexler, a prominent Democrat who once upon a time helped organize Eugene McCarthy's 1968 antiwar presidential campaign and who now lobbies for a fair portion of the Fortune 500, and former G.O.P. congressman Robert Walker, who was one of Newt Gingrich's closest allies during the latter's reign as House speaker.
Back in 1997, Public Policy Associates put together a musical revue about lobbying that it offered clients as an educational tool, and the show gives a pretty good idea of how the firm courts Washington. One skit, performed for a group of Burger King operators called the National Franchise Association (NFA), included a song performed to the tune of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”:
Congressman, senator we've formed a PAC
Now we can act, no need for tact,
Pooling resources makes very good sense
So we formed a little PAC
When NFA's membership starts to pitch in
Growing the fund, access begins
Should ever a congressman put up his guard
The PAC is our calling card . . .
Any lawmaker ignoring our PAC
Risks being fried like a Big Mac
Working together's the tried and true way to
Deliver the facts, give pats on the back
Favors attract, enemies sacked
Through NFA's brand new PAC!
Public Policy Associates knows of which it sings. During the last three election cycles, the company's own PAC doled out more than $315,000 in political contributions; its employees gave an additional $255,000.
The firm's rainmaker on transportation issues is Timothy Hannegan, a former aviation expert at the General Accounting Office. Hannegan, who is described on the firm website as “a prolific Democratic fundraiser,” helped secure passage of the congressional airline-aid package in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Another Hannegan client, the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, in California's Sierra Nevada range, recently underwent what Ski Magazine termed “the biggest makeover in the history of skiing.” The makeover, intended to transform the resort's image from a family-oriented ski park to a retreat for the superrich, included new lodges, luxury chalets, and high-priced condominiums. Mammoth Mountain wanted to see the local transportation network upgraded to help move in the new upscale clientele, and so last year its home town won a $1 million earmark for a bus-maintainance facility that primarily services the resort. Hannegan, who is being paid a $40,000 annual retainer by Mammoth Mountain, says that he did not lobby for that earmark but acknowledges that he is currently soliciting appropriations money for a controversial new regional airport on the resort's behalf.
The defense appropriations bill is, as one might imagine, a particularly popular target for seekers of pork. In 1980 there were just 62 earmarks in the defense appropriations bill; last year there were 2,671, worth a combined $12.2 billion. That included $3 million to develop bathrooms made entirely of stainless steel; $3.75 million for alcoholism research (at, of all places, the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, in San Francisco); and $1 million to help eradicate brown tree snakes in Guam. It also contained $13.85 million for textile companies in North Carolina that produce clothing for the Pentagon, including Odor Signature Reduction Products for Special Forces and Smart Apparel for Warriors.
That latter line of clothing, which will be subsidized with $1 million in taxpayer money, is being developed by the Sara Lee Corp., which—though better known for its frozen cheesecake, pies, and “brownie bites”—also has an apparel division based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that manufactures Playtex, L'eggs, and Wonderbra. I was never able to determine exactly what Smart Apparel for Warriors is, since no one at Sara Lee's headquarters in Chicago or in Winston-Salem was willing to talk about it: they claimed that the project, as a Pentagon contract, was too sensitive to discuss. But I was able to determine, through lobby-disclosure forms, that the company obtained the money with the help (for a $20,000 retainer) of The PMA Group, a lobby shop that, according to its website, is “the premier Washington consulting organization in the defense arena.”
Paul Magliocchetti, a former top staffer at the appropriations committees and nine-year veteran of the defense subcommittee, is the founder and president of PMA, which is strategically located on the Metro's Blue Line, two stops from the Pentagon. The move to the private sector has paid off quite handsomely for Magliocchetti, who had been forced to eke out a living on his $65,200-a-year salary at House appropriations. Since 1998, by contrast, Magliocchetti's firm has received $21.7 million in fees from large defense companies—the most paid to any lobbying firm, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity. PMA has thirty-two lobbyists, and all but one of them are revolving-door alumni from the Defense Department or Capitol Hill. Ten have experience on one of the two appropriations committees. PMA's website is not terribly subtle about the company's ability to rig the system. “No one understands the inner workings of our nation's capital better than The PMA Group,” it says. “Many of our associates have formulated or helped to shape the policies that are in place today.”
The firm's PAC is one of the defense industry's most generous, doling out more than $975,000 to 340 House and Senate lawmakers, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Of direct contributions from PMA lobbyists, the three top recipients—Reps. Pete Visclosky, John Murtha, and James Moran—are all key players on the appropriations committees. Collectively they received about $87,250 from PMA between 1998 and 2003.
No immediate suspect emerges in the question of which member of Congress inserted Sara Lee's earmark. In the case of another winner in last year's defense-earmarks sweepstakes, Night Vision Equipment Company of Allentown, Pennsylvania, there is not only a suspect but one with motive and means as well: Arlen Specter, the third-ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Night Vision won a $1.25 million earmark in the defense bill, funding lobbied for by IKON Public Affairs, to which Night Vision paid $60,000. IKON deployed two lobbyists to work the Night Vision account, Peter Grollman and Craig Snyder, both of whom previously held senior posts on Specter's staff. Between 2000 and 2004, IKON donated $13,250 to Specter, with $7,250 of that coming directly from Snyder and Grollman. During that same period, Night Vision's then president, William Grube (along with his wife), kicked in $8,000 to Specter.
Just months before the defense appropriations bill passed, Snyder helped Specter fight off a fierce primary challenge from Pat Toomey. The electoral hopes of Toomey, who favors a ban on abortion, rested on his trouncing Specter in the state's conservative heartland, where the senator's pro-choice politics have made him a pariah. Shortly before the primary vote, Snyder put together a PAC called Pennsylvanians for Honest Politics, which promptly raised $17,750, with one third coming directly from Snyder and Grube. Almost all of that money was spent to produce and air a radio ad that ran in the last few days of the campaign—on just a single Christian station that airs only in conservative areas. The ad savaged Toomey for failing to call, during an interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball, for criminal sanctions against a woman who gets an abortion. “Somebody who claims to be on our side had the opportunity to say abortion is murder,” says the ad's protagonist. “Instead of showing the nation real pro-life leadership, Toomey shrunk like a frightened turtle.” Specter won by just 17,146 votes out of more than a million ballots cast and did far better in conservative counties than expected.
Less than three months later it was Specter, along with Sen. Rick Santorum, who announced that Night Vision had won the earmarks. “These projects, key to our nation's defense, will be invaluable in our continuing war against terror,” he declared. So was it Specter who inserted the earmark for Night Vision? No one knows for certain, since neither the company, Specter, nor the Senate Appropriations Committee would comment.
Members of Congress are, of course, perpetually decrying the spending excesses of the body they compose; the late Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, who served between 1949 and 1967, archly likened his colleagues to “drunkards who shout for temperance in the intervals between cocktails.” Just as with campaign finance, Congress in fact has little incentive to reform a system that protects incumbents, Republicans and Democrats alike. “Getting between a lawmaker and an earmark is like trying to take a ribeye away from a dog,” says Keith Ashdown. “Congress sees it as one of its most fundamental rights.”
Anyone who imagines that Congress could discipline itself on pork should consider the case of the $32 billion Department of Homeland Security budget. When DHS was created in 2003, congressional leaders agreed that its appropriations bill would not be earmarked, so that pork-barreling would not muddle the priorities of the incipient War on Terror. That first year the ban held—only eighteen earmarks, worth $423 million, were attached, despite the more than seven hundred lobbyists who had registered to work on homeland-security issues. The lobbyists, however, kept their chins up. “This is a stage where people are still cultivating relationships,” one hopeful told a reporter for Congressional Quarterly in July 2003. Said another lobbyist, a former representative named Steven Kuykendall: “It's a challenge, but that's what guys like me get paid to do.”
Two years of persistence have apparently paid off. This spring, as the 2006 appropriations process got under way, Capitol Hill was awash with rumors that the informal moratorium would soon be abandoned. Congress Daily reported in April that the heads of the appropriations subcommittees on homeland security—Rep. Harold Rogers (R., Ky.) and Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.)—were debating whether to end the ban, and thereby to allow earmarks to bloom within DHS with the same fecundity as elsewhere in the federal budget. One lobbyist opined, no doubt with great gravity of tone, that homeland-security agencies could benefit from “additional Congressional oversight.”
Congress, no doubt, will soon concur; even if the moratorium survives another year or two, its days are surely numbered. Thirty-two billion dollars, when none have been siphoned off for friends, are overdue for oversight indeed.
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| SEE ALSO: Appropriations and expenditures; Lobbyists; Political corruption; United States. Congress; Waste in government spending | |||||||||
| Response: September 2005, page 4 · September 2005, page 4 · September 2005, page 5 | |||||||||
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