November 24, 2004
Congress is spending its lame-duck session trying to pass the remainder of its funding bills before heading home for the holidays. In order to spread some Christmas cheer, lawmakers have stuffed the budgetary goose with plenty of pork, including a measure that Senator John McCain dubbed the No Shrimp Left Behind Act: The spending plan awaiting President Bush's signature is packed with them, doling out $4 million for an Alabama fertilizer development center, $1 million each for a Norwegian American Foundation in Seattle and a "Wild American Shrimp Initiative," and more, much more. Despite soaring deficits, lawmakers from both parties who approved the $388 billion package last weekend set plenty of money aside for home-district projects like these, knowing they sow goodwill among special interests and voters. They also raised the ire of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a pork-barrel critic who took to the Senate floor to ask whether shrimp...
September 28, 2005
I have been watching the Porkbusters campaign championed by Instapundit, NZ Bear, Michelle Malkin, and others with a wistful sense of admiration and regret. Normally I would love to dive into the federal budget and find the pork, but due to work obligations, family issues, and other investigations I'm pursuing at the moment on the blog, I simply don't have the time. Those who have worked hard to make this effort have done a tremendous job in identifying billions of dollars in federal spending on foolishness and waste. My good friend Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation called me today and asked me why I had not yet blogged about Porkbusters. I told him that without having much to contribute that I didn't want to distract from the effort made by other bloggers. He suggested that I could assist the program by expanding the Not One Dime More effort to...
September 30, 2005
One of the benefits of the Not One Dime For Porkers campaign applies to the politicians and not to the electorate whose money disappears into these waste-laden programs. Sometimes, when politicians dig into half-baked pork, they find it quite damaging to their political health. Take Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, for example. After making arrangements for a series of federal grants to a Nevada church, Reid now may suffer a bit of indigestion from the fraudulent use of the money: The money that led to the indictment this week of two Las Vegas pastors and the wife of one of them came from federal grants arranged by Sen. Harry Reid in September 2001, a Reid spokeswoman said Wednesday. Moving to distance Reid from a possible scandal, aide Tessa Hafen said the senator sought the money on behalf of a nonprofit social services agency and not for the churches or persons...
October 17, 2005
In a development that will certainly please conservatives who look at the growth in federal government and wonder which party has won the past few elections, the House has begun to turn towards budget reductions and the reduction in federal growth that has long been the GOP standard. In fact, Operation Offset, launched by Rep. Mike Pence, has stirred interest largely due to Tom DeLay's contention that no further fat could be found in a federal budget that eats up a higher percentage of the nation's GDP than it ever did during WWII: Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other GOP leaders quashed demands...
October 24, 2005
Fifteen votes out of a hundred. I haven't written much about the failure of the Coburn Amendment until today, although it has been the topic of some excellent writing in the blogosphere. Start with Mark Tapscott and work your way outward. The only demand that Tom Coburn made of his fellow Senators was to redirect a couple of pork projects from a list of 14,000 towards the rebuilding of New Orleans, rather than go out and look for new revenues -- in other words, new taxes. What happened when Coburn asked this sacrifice of the Upper Chamber? Hissy fits and threats. As John at Power Line remarked to me in a conversation, whenever Patty Murray and Ted Stevens find themselves on the same side of an issue, the only thing that it can be about is money. Murray stood up and threatened any Senator who dared to vote to kill...
November 3, 2005
The irony proved too delicious to pass unnoticed. The National Press Foundation agreed to host a joint seminar on media coverage of the budget crisis, sponsored and initiated by the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution in order to promote wider and more in-depth coverage of the expanding monetary gap. Journalists, policymakers, and one lowly blogger (yours truly) came as guests and speakers to discuss the causes of the budget crisis and why the media has so much trouble engaging public attention on it. However, when attendees and presenters alike arrived at the National Press Club, they found a separate event scheduled as a special luncheon, square in the middle of the budget-crisis seminar. Ambassador Joe Wilson would make an appearance and give a talk about his exploits in Niger and as a gadfly to the Bush administration. We received a first-hand practical lesson on attention spans when some of...
December 22, 2005
The failure of the ANWR strategy of amending arctic drilling to the defense budget, even as other spending amendments remain attached to the Pentagon funding, has Jon Henke at QandO thinking about how best to fight pork and get more honest votes on all federal funding. Jon, who runs one of the best neoliberatarian sites along with co-bloggers Dale Franks and McQ, wants to return to line-item budgeting: The Parties have each failed to coordinate their principles on legislating-via-budget because they don't actually have any principles on legislating-via-budget. Their position on the process is entirely dependent upon the outcome. They have no Original Position. While calculations of power and interest might lead one to conclude that this process-pervesion will ultimately be productive, this is not a promising way to organize government. The tables will turn, the majority will be the minority and the precedent will have been set. Republicans often...
January 28, 2006
The latest Wall Street Journal editorial on pork once again sounds all the right alarms in dealing with the profligate spending in Washington and the ensuing corruption that it brings. It starts off by scoffing at an earmarked subsidy from the US Navy on a "waterless urinal" -- we used to call those pipes, by the way, and they didn't cost two million dollars -- and goes on to urge an end to all earmarks and a line-item veto: Now for the good news. Amid the humiliating publicity about the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, maple syrup research in Vermont and blueberry subsidies in Massachusetts, nearly everyone in Congress is suddenly swearing off pork. All three Republicans running for House Majority Leader have pledged to end the abuse of "earmarks." And so has Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, though she too has used her political clout to steer millions of dollars...
February 2, 2006
The GOP took a step forward on tackling entitlement spending, narrowly squeaking out a victory in the House yesterday on a $40-billion cut to Medicare and other federal programs. It represents the first effort in almost a decade to reform programs that threaten to grow unchecked until they gobble up almost the entire federal budget: House Republicans eked out a victory on a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package on Wednesday, with a handful of skittish Republicans switching their votes at the last minute in opposition to reductions in spending on health and education programs. ... The measure represents the first major effort by lawmakers since 1997 to cut the growth of so-called entitlement programs, including student loans, crop subsidies and Medicaid, in which spending is determined by eligibility criteria. It passed 216 to 214, with 13 Republicans voting against. The Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the decisive vote, approved...
February 7, 2006
The Heritage Foundation has released a report that shows the federal budget in crisis, and pork only tells part of the story. Titled Federal Spending - By The Numbers, the Brian Riedl report gives an easily-accessible look at the growth in federal spending during the Bush administration that should sober any drunken Congressman right up. It also demonstrates without a doubt that the tax cuts enacted by Bush have nothing to do with this crisis. Tax revenues, in fact, have steadily increased during the tax cut period, and overall have more than doubled since 1990. In 2000, the last full year of Bill Clinton's term, tax receipts came to $2.025T. They dipped in 2001 and 2002 with the recession, dropping to a low of $1.783T in 2003, when the tax cuts got implemented. They have jumped in the last two years, to $1.88T and $2.154T, the last a 14% increase...
March 19, 2006
The San Diego Union-Tribune continues its reporting on the bribery scandal that finally derailed -- and jailed -- Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham for corruption. The testimony from Cunningham that he had plenty of company for his malfeasances has led U-T reporter Dean Calbreath to dig deeper, and he has found more evidence of lobbying money ending up in the personal accounts of a lawmaker: A week before former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham was sentenced to prison, he stressed to the court that a number of other lawmakers also helped arrange federal funding for the defense contractors who bribed him. None of the lawmakers Cunningham mentioned by name – Reps. Katherine Harris of Florida, Virgil Goode of Virginia and John Doolittle from the Sacramento suburb of Granite Bay – has been accused of criminal wrongdoing. But each has admitted assisting either Mitchell Wade or Brent Wilkes, co-conspirators in the Cunningham case,...
March 29, 2006
Mark Tapscott has the skinny on how Senator Trent Lott decided to keep pork in the dark. Lott scuttled an amendment by Tom Coburn and Barrack Obama that would have created a public database of pork projects so that taxpayers could see where Congress spends their money. Lott, apparently, decided that government spending is none of the taxpayers' business and has nothing to do with lobbying reform. Really? Sen. Trent Lott, R-MS, raised a Rule 22 Point of Order which resulted in the Coburn/Obama amendment being killed. ... The Senate's Rule 22 refers to the germaneness - i.e. relevance - of a proposed amendment. Translated from the Washington legislatese in which senators and congressmen so often hide, this means Lott thinks making sure the public can see who is getting more than $300 billion of their tax dollars has nothing to do with congressional ethics. Put another way, Lott just...
April 5, 2006
Mark Tapscott continues his excellent watchdog duties as he prepares to leave the Heritage Foundation for greener pastures at the Examiner newspaper chain (coming to a town near you, and soon). Mark posts the latest hostile reaction to Porkbusters by the former Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott: Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Republican from Mississippi, has had it to here with Porkbusters and other critics of pork barrel spending like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, who think the federal government has better things to do with $700 million of the taxpayers money than tear up a just-repaired coastal rail line and replace it with a new highway. Said Lott when asked by an AP reporter about criticism of the project he has long championed and which was just funded in a Senate Appropriations Committee bill to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as additional Hurricane...
May 3, 2006
The effort to put an end to earmarks -- the technical term for pork-barrel projects in the federal budget -- hit a snag yesterday when the US Senate voted to keep such unrelated projects out of emergency spending legislation on hurricane relief and the Iraq war effort. In a related development, Robert Byrd vehemently opposed a modified versions of the line-item veto that he supported during the Clinton administration: The Senate voted Tuesday to protect home-state projects added by some of its most senior members to an Iraq war and hurricane relief funding bill as the tide turned against efforts by spending hawks to strip them out. ... The price tag of the bill, therefore, has grown to more than $108 billion, despite Bush's promise to veto any measure that exceeds his request of $92.2 billion for the war and hurricane relief and another $2.3 billion to combat avian flu....
May 4, 2006
Mark Tapscott notes in two posts that both Republicans and Democrats named chronic pork supporters to the conference committee reconciling the emergency spending legislation from both chambers of Congress: THE PRESIDING OFFICER: UNDER THE PREVIOUS ORDER, THE CHAIR APPOINTS THE FOLLOWING AS CONFEREES ON THE PART OF THE SENATE. THE CLERK: SENATORS COCHRAN, STEVENS, SPECTER, DOMENICI, BOND, McCONNELL, BURNS, SHELBY, GREGG, BENNETT, CRAIG, HUTCHISON, DeWINE, BROWNBACK, ALLARD, BYRD, INOUYE, LEAHY, HARKIN, MIKULSKI, REID, KOHL, MURRAY, DORGAN, FEINSTEIN, DURBIN, JOHNSON, AND LANDRIEU. Mark calls this a Porkers Hall of Fame, and then provides the data to back it up. It turns out that this group has individually voted to retain pork almost three times as often as they have voted for its elimination. Denny Hastert has declared the Senate version a dead letter in the House, balking at the $17 billion in increased spending it delivers, but he may wind up...
May 8, 2006
The Washington Examiner exhorts George Bush to take an unprecedented step for this administration and veto any emergency spending plan that includes $20 billion in pork. The editorial argues that the White House must establish its authority in spending now or lose it for the rest of the term: President Bush has frequently portrayed many of his most controversial actions as necessary to protect executive branch prerogatives against usurpations of power by Congress. So it is especially curious that Bush has yet to use the most potent weapon the Founders gave occupants of the Oval Office against Congress: the veto. If Bush is truly serious about protecting the powers and prerogatives of his office, he will set aside his veto reservations and slam-dunk the emergency funding bill if it comes to his desk in anything remotely resembling the form in which the Senate passed it last week. Bush originally asked...
May 17, 2006
The New York Sun reports on a new initiative by tax activist Grover Norquist to rein in spending -- rule changes in both the House and Senate that limit the tenure on appropriations committees. Norquist wants to have more fresh faces each session in order to combat the descent of otherwise rational politicians into a spendthrift groupthink: Grover Norquist, president of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, is advancing a new approach to fighting government corruption: term limits for members of congressional appropriations committees. Speaking to The New York Sun yesterday, Mr. Norquist claimed that members of appropriations committees developed a sort of groupthink over time, and regardless of their partisan affiliations, eventually began thinking like appropriators. ... Mr. Norquist has recently traveled with Rep. Tom Feeney, a Republican of Florida, who supports the idea and will help introduce it into the House. "We'll do it after the next...
May 24, 2006
Don't say we didn't sound the alarm early on pork-barrel politics and their destructive potential to GOP midterm hopes. The Washington Post has an article that shows how victims of Hurricane Katrina remain homeless while the Republicans in the Senate pork up the emergency relief bill with hundreds of millions of dollars for their corporate pals: BILOXI, Miss. -- This city's east side remains largely abandoned, a bleak panorama of empty lots and abandoned homes left behind by the tradesmen, shrimpers and casino workers who once lived here. Hundreds had little or no insurance. For people such as 83-year-old Elzora Brown, a retired dry-cleaning presser whose little frame house was waterlogged up to the eaves, there's not enough federal disaster aid for repairs. "Whatever the Lord sees fit, that's what I'll have," she said. Just down the coast in Pascagoula, defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. similarly didn't have enough insurance...
May 31, 2006
The Washington Examiner today endorses a Senate bill that would require the government to create a public database that would allow taxpayers to access data for all federal expenditures (except for indivdual assistance). Tom Coburn, a noted pork hawk, authored the bill and has a bipartisan group of co-sponsors which include Barack Obama and John McCain: Abraham Lincoln said, “Let the people know the facts and all will be safe,” so the Great Emancipator would certainly cheer an unlikely group of United States senators who have recently joined forces to push a potentially landmark measure. That measure is designed to put every American citizen within a few mouse clicks of knowing the facts needed to track federal spending as never before. This measure should receive top-priority attention in Congress and be signed by President Bush at the earliest possible opportunity. The proposal is known as the Federal Funding Accountability and...
The Washington Examiner today endorses a Senate bill that would require the government to create a public database that would allow taxpayers to access data for all federal expenditures (except for indivdual assistance). Tom Coburn, a noted pork hawk, authored the bill and has a bipartisan group of co-sponsors which include Barack Obama and John McCain: Abraham Lincoln said, “Let the people know the facts and all will be safe,” so the Great Emancipator would certainly cheer an unlikely group of United States senators who have recently joined forces to push a potentially landmark measure. That measure is designed to put every American citizen within a few mouse clicks of knowing the facts needed to track federal spending as never before. This measure should receive top-priority attention in Congress and be signed by President Bush at the earliest possible opportunity. The proposal is known as the Federal Funding Accountability and...
June 6, 2006
The Center for Public Integrity reports that lobbyists provided Congress with over $50 million in trips between January 2000 and June 2005. The amount of time spent away from the office also comes to a staggering 81,000 days: Over 5 1/2 years, Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly $50 million in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales, from corporations and groups seeking legislative favors, according to the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of congressional travel. From January 2000 through June 2005, House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days -- a combined 222 years -- on at least 23,000 trips, according to the report, issued yesterday by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. About 2,300 of the trips cost $5,000 or more, at least 500 cost $10,000 or more, and 16 cost $25,000 or more. "While some of...
June 9, 2006
The conference committee on the emergency appropriations bill has reached agreement on the measure which had an original spending gap of $16 billion. The resulting bill will reach the White House at $94.5 billion, $2.5 billion more than the House-approved plan but much lighter than the heavily-porked version the Senate tried mightily to get: House and Senate negotiators reached agreement last night on a $94.5 billion package to pay for Iraq war and hurricane recovery costs, after shaving numerous extraneous provisions that the Senate had wanted to stuff into the bill. The bill, which is expected to reach President Bush's desk next week, would designate $65.8 billion to the Pentagon to cover troop pay, provide recruiting incentives, buy new body armor and fund continued operations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other items. Diplomacy projects in the region would receive $3.9 billion in new funding. The bill would...
June 12, 2006
Every once in a while, a politician provides a moment of utter clarity, usually inadvertently, which defines their character so well that further defense is pointless. Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) not only did that for himself but for his entire party, and provided the Republicans with a valuable sound bite for the upcoming mid-terms in every district: If Democrats win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, U.S. Rep. Jim Moran said he would use his position in the majority to help funnel more funds to his Northern Virginia district. Moran, D-8th, told those attending the Arlington County Democratic Committee's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on June 9 that while he in theory might oppose the fiscal irresponsibility of “earmarks” - funneling money to projects in a member of Congress's district - he understands the value they have to constituents. “When I become chairman [of a House appropriations...
June 13, 2006
The Hill quotes another Congressman who believes he has a right to spend our money on whatever pork projects he can fund. At a time when serious questions arising from Appropriations chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA) have cast doubt on the credibility and integrity of the House committee, another of its members, Rep. Ray La Hood (R-IL), declared that he has had enough of the taxpayers' "crap": Appropriations members have already vowed to fight any move to strip spending from the bill. “I’m not going to take their crap,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said last week. The Illinois appropriator said he included several projects for his district and would fight to keep them all. “They think they’ve gotten a little steam building, and we’re going to have to shoot them down,” LaHood said. He ripped RSC members this year on the House floor for successfully stripping $507 million in construction projects...
June 14, 2006
The House Budget Committee has returned the line-item veto to the full House on a bipartisan vote, 24-9, delivering a potentially valuable tool in the fight over earmarks. The new bill would allow the President to return line items from bills for an up-or-down vote in Congress, forcing porkers to take responsibility for their spending habits and links to benefactors: Congress is moving to give President Bush and his successors greater power to try to weed bills of certain spending, though the new power would pale compared with the line-item veto law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998. The House Budget Committee on Wednesday approved by a 24-9 vote a bill to allow the president to single out wasteful items contained in appropriations bills he signs into law, and it would require Congress to vote on those items again. The idea is that wasteful "pork barrel" spending would...
The House Budget Committee has returned the line-item veto to the full House on a bipartisan vote, 24-9, delivering a potentially valuable tool in the fight over earmarks. The new bill would allow the President to return line items from bills for an up-or-down vote in Congress, forcing porkers to take responsibility for their spending habits and links to benefactors: Congress is moving to give President Bush and his successors greater power to try to weed bills of certain spending, though the new power would pale compared with the line-item veto law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998. The House Budget Committee on Wednesday approved by a 24-9 vote a bill to allow the president to single out wasteful items contained in appropriations bills he signs into law, and it would require Congress to vote on those items again. The idea is that wasteful "pork barrel" spending would...
Note: Be sure to read Dennis Hastert's response through his attorneys in the updates below, as well as more information on the transaction. The Sunlight Foundation reports that another apparently clear linkage between pork and a politician's pocket exists in the business dealings of Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). They report that Hastert has pushed through $207 million in earmarks for a business venture financed by a trust owned in part by Hastert himself: House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has used an Illinois trust to invest in real estate near the proposed route of the Prairie Parkway, a highway project for which he's secured $207 million in earmarked appropriations. The trust has already transferred 138 acres of land to a real estate development firm that has plans to build a 1,600-home community, located just a few miles from the north-south connector Hastert has championed in the House. Hastert's 2005 financial disclosure...
June 22, 2006
The Washington Post picks up on the profit taken by Dennis Hastert and his partners in the Little Rock Trust that came from $207 million in federal highway funding, a traffic corridor championed by Hastert himself and funded through pork-barrel earmarks. Now it turns out that federal highway earmarks may have enriched two more Congressmen in a similar manner: House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) made a $2 million profit last year on the sale of land 5 1/2 miles from a highway project that he helped to finance with targeted federal funds. A Republican House member from California, meanwhile, received nearly double what he paid for a four-acre parcel near an Air Force base after securing $8 million for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles away. And another California GOP congressman obtained funding in last year's highway bill for street improvements near a planned residential and commercial development that...
The House just passed the new limited line-item veto moments ago, 247-172, with 35 Democrats voting to support the Republican initiative on reform. Andrew Taylor at the AP notes the irony in this vote: Lawmakers voted to give Bush and his successor a new, weaker version of the line-item veto law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998, despite a recent series of lopsided votes in which they've rallied to preserve each other's back-home projects. It would expire after six years. The idea advances amid increasing public concern about lawmakers' penchant for stuffing parochial projects into spending bills that the president must accept or reject in their entirety. ... The bill would allow the president to single out items contained in appropriations bills he signs into law, and it would require Congress to vote on those items again. It also could be used against increases in benefit programs and...
July 3, 2006
The New York Times reports today on the burgeoning bipartisan demand for full disclosure on federal spending via public, searchable databases that would expose pork to the maximum public scrutiny. Jason DeParle reports that while both the Left and the Right have different motivations, both see a fully searchable database for the federal budget as a promise of more accountability in governance: Exasperated by his party's failure to cut government spending, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is seeking cyberhelp. Mr. Coburn wants to create a public database, searchable over the Internet, that would list most government contracts and grants — exposing hundreds of billions in annual spending to instant desktop view. ... On the right, support for the plan reflects an old concern about spending and a new faith in the power of blogs. Supporters picture a citizen army of e-watchdogs, greatly increasing the influence of antispending groups in...
July 6, 2006
The Sunlight Foundation has a new poll for blog readers across the political spectrum. Several of us, including Instapundit and Truth Laid Bear, will post this poll ourselves and collect data from our readers. It's not meant to be scientific but rather a bit of temperature-taking, as well as a little fun for everyone. Take a moment and fill it out so we can see where CQ readers stand on the issue: Written by Micah Sifry on July 6, 2006 - 9:21am. In the wake of scandals involving lobbyists like Jack Abramoff and Congressmen like Tom DeLay (R-TX), Bob Ney (R-OH), William Jefferson (D-LA), and Alan Mollahan (D-WV), do you think Congress is doing enough to clean itself up?: Yes No I don't know Which do you think will happen first? The current leadership of Congress will push for real ethics and lobbying reforms, or Elvis will be sighted?: Congressional...
July 14, 2006
Mark Tapscott, who has worked tirelessly against pork-barrel spending at his own blog, the Heritage Foundation, and now as editorial page editor at The Examiner, will testify in the Senate on July 18th on the impact of a proposed federal spending databse on journalism. The subcommittee on Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security ... needs a name change ... but also will hear testimony on Tom Coburn's bill creating an Internet database of all federal spending, searchable and open to all: Sen. Tom Coburn will convene a hearing July 18 of the Senate's Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security to "highlight the lack of transparency in federal spending decisions, as well as the merits of legislation to create a website disclosing the recipients of all federal funding." There will be two panels, with the first consisting of senators John McCain, R-AZ, and Barack Obama, D-IL,...
July 18, 2006
I'm watching the Senate hearing on the bill that Senator Tom Coburn has pushed to get a searchable database on federal funding. I got to it a little late -- Senator John McCain just started his testimony now 1:42 CT - He's quoting from today's Washington Post about a rancher who found himself stunned to be eligible for federal relef after the space shuttle Columbia disaster -- and those funds came from a drought fund! 1:46 - McCain finishes up by noting that the only reason to refuse this database is to admit that government has something to hide. McCain has certainly taken the right approach on this, but I'm not sure that his anecdotes really get to the heart of the problem. Perhaps it is impolite to mention it, but the real reason isn't to keep ranchers from getting drought funds they don't deserve, but to keep politicians from...
July 22, 2006
I've begun posting at the Heritage Foundation Policy Blog, and have two new posts there on budgetary issues. The first post reviews a paper written by Brian Riedl and Baker Spring, showing that four years after the war, Congress still appropriates for the war as if they didn't know it existed. We need to stop funding war efforts through emergency appropriations, which as we saw this session, create too many opportunities for pork-barrel mischief. The second paper I highlighted at Heritage rethinks the entire process of attacking unnecessary spending. Brian Riedl and Michelle Muccio have an inspired idea about how to gain political clout through the bundling of spending reductions, gathering enough programs to jettison so that the sum of the expenditures excites enough passion to overwhelm the natural constituencies of the programs themselves. It sounds impossible, but Riedl and Muccio show how the BRAC process did just that --...
July 24, 2006
CNN had a good article last night explaining why Randy "Duke" Cunningham could deliver so much pork to his partners in corruption -- he hid earmarks in classified appropriations bills for the intelligence budget. The report made much of the secrecy involved in black-box budgeting -- but said nothing about the normal operational secrecy of earmarks in every other facet of appropriations. In my lastest post at the Heritage Foundation's Policy Blog, I point that out -- and discuss the obvious solutions. Give it a read, and let me know what you think. Addendum: Don't forget to blogroll the Policy Blog, and you can get the RSS feed here....
July 25, 2006
I find it very helpful to read columnists from across the political spectrum, and not just to find targets for fisking; sometime one needs an outsider's perspective to see a larger truth. In this case, E.J. Dionne provides that perspective, and the larger truth is that after a generation of demanding smaller federal government, Republicans -- especially Republican incumbents -- have not succeeded in changing the political paradigm of pork-barrel politics at all: Most people outside Virginia's Hampton Roads region have never heard of Craney Island -- and neither had Webb, an anti-politician whose career has taken him from the military to the Reagan administration to writing and now back to the Democratic Party. Allen asked: "Jim, what's your position on the proper use of Craney Island?" Webb replied, candidly: "I'm not sure where Craney Island is. Why don't you tell me?" No doubt feeling very pleased, Allen replied: "Craney...
Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) got Congress to pass his amendment to the Deep Water Energy Resources Act that had nothing to do with deep water or energy resources. Instead, HR 3496 earmarked $1.5 billion for the Washington DC Metro system, which operates above water in all senses except financially. The Heritage Foundation's Ronald Utt describes the amendment as "the biggest pork earmark in history", and it's headed for the Senate. I discuss this in my latest post at the Heritage Foundation. Most amazing, the earmark comes because the constituent cities and states involved have little interest in funding improvements to their own system -- so Davis decided to charge every man, woman, and child in America $5 to have someone else ride the bus or train in our nation's capital. Why, exactly, is this a federal problem? Davis has an explanation that will make you roll your eyes, and the...
July 28, 2006
My new post at the Heritage Foundation Policy Blog discusses a new effort by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to give Congress the power to remove spending from an already-approved budget. King's proposal, Cut the Unnecessary Tab (CUT) resolution, would amend House rules to require a quarterly rescission bill to review all unspent federal monies. Any member could then offer an amendment to delete a particular line item, and each amendment would have to receive a recorded vote -- putting each Representative on record on the program involved. King's release describes the benefits: Everything Is On The Table • All appropriations spending is subject to review and rescission. During this spending reduction process, every single spending item would be up for reconsideration, and no Member of Congress could make excuses for failing to cut spending because the process would provide a record of their actions. All Savings Go to Deficit Reduction...
July 31, 2006
Today's Washington Post has an article on the progress of the federal-spending database, but thanks to the Post's editors, it's buried on page D-4 of the Metro section rather than in national news. It contains an assertion that federal contractors will balk at having their oh-so-lucrative contracts listed for the public to review: Politically, though, the bill could run into problems, as many large companies with federal contracts might not want certain infor