As a proposal to require full disclosure of all Senate earmarks languishes, senators have not claimed responsibility for at least $7.5 billion worth of projects approved by the Appropriations Committee, according to an analysis by a budget watchdog group.
Under seven of 10 spending bills approved by the panel, more than $26 billion has been earmarked for projects sought by both senators and the Bush administration, leaving nearly 30 percent unaccounted for, according to numbers compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“Part of the whole effort of transparency is to move the budget out of the shadows and into the light,” said Steve Ellis, the group’s vice president for programs. “The public deserves to know what Congress and the administration are doing with their tax dollars.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee refutes the findings, arguing that the group misinterpreted a host of appropriations requirements as earmarks. For instance, the panel argues that $6.5 billion requested by the Pentagon for the base realignment and closure program was considered “undisclosed earmarks” by the group’s analysis of the military construction spending bill.
But with no clear rules in place, the dispute highlights the murky nature of what exactly constitutes an earmark, or a directive to spend a specific amount of money for an individual project.
“There really is no precise understanding statutorily or otherwise about what an earmark is,” said a Senate Appropriations Committee aide.
Reforming the rampant earmarking practice has been a top priority of Democrats, who campaigned last year that 12 years of Republican rule on Capitol Hill amounted to a “culture of corruption” capped by the abuse of earmarks in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
On the first day of the new Congress, the House passed new rules to identify all members who sponsored earmarks in authorization, appropriations and tax bills, requiring each member to submit a justification of the request and a statement certifying neither they nor their spouses would benefit financially. The Senate did not change its rules, but instead added similar language to a broad overhaul bill of lobbying and ethics polices.
But that bill has stalled as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has blocked the Senate from moving to bicameral negotiations with the House. DeMint, an ardent opponent of earmarks, is demanding that the Senate immediately change its earmark disclosure rules before moving to conference.
“This just shows that what we are doing with regards to making earmarks fully transparent is important,” DeMint said yesterday in response to the watchdog group’s findings. “It’s time for the Senate to end business as usual and implement earmark transparency rules now.”
Democrats argue that ethics reform should be done broadly and written into law, rather than chipped away on a piecemeal basis, as DeMint is advocating.
In response to the stalemate, the Appropriations Committee has sought to get ahead of the problem by requesting that senators disclose the earmarks they want in the bill and whether they have a financial interest in the matter. For the first time, the panel argues, there is an unprecedented amount of publicly available information on earmark requests by individual senators.
“We’re putting more information out there than has ever been out there before,” said the Appropriations Committee aide.
Still, budget watchdogs complain that the disclosures have been sporadic and not nearly as thorough as House requests.
Operating under more relaxed rules, senators in several instances have secured far more earmarks than their House counterparts, including in the Interior appropriations bill that funds environmental programs. In its measure, the Senate Appropriations Committee has five times the amount of earmarks than the House bill, totaling about $540 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. But the Senate’s spending bill includes 17 undisclosed earmarks, totaling $83 million, the group says.
In securing earmarks, senior appropriators, subcommittee chairmen and ranking members have been the most successful, notably in the Commerce, Justice and Science spending bill where the ranking Republican on the subcommittee that funds those programs, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, won more than $126 million in earmarked funds.
The Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee chairman, Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), won 51 earmarks totaling $37.8 million in the spending bill he oversaw, but was outdone by two senior appropriators — Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye — who would take home $64 million and $71.6 million, respectively.
Of the seven appropriations bills, the chairman of the full committee, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), has requested $147 million worth of projects, and his Republican counterpart, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) has worked both with other senators and individually in winning $354 million for projects. Analyses of three other appropriations bills had not been released because they were recently approved by the panel.
Party leaders have also not shied away from the practice, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) has secured $142.5 million for his home state of Nevada and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has won $51 million for Kentucky. In a defense authorization bill that is now on the Senate floor, McConnell has secured $139.6 million in earmarks; Reid has about $40 million.
Clearly popular with both parties still, lawmakers say earmarks are a key way to ensure that the money is being spent exactly how Congress sees fit.
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