Same Game, New Name
Cribbing off the Bard of Avon: an earmark by any other name would still smell as rotten. Such appears to be the case with the so-called fiscally conservative majority set to take control of Congress. You know the ones, those Republicans who were all fired up for a ban on spending earmarks. Turns out they’ve found a way to have their pork and eat it, too.
It’s simple, really: tag earmarks with another slick moniker and keep right on spending. It’s called “lettermarking,” and is apparently the latest rage sweeping D.C.
This from The NY Times, which uses Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL), along with some of his Republican colleagues, as the highlighted example in earmarking hypocrisy:
Though Mr. Kirk and other Republicans thundered against pork-barrel spending and lawmakers’ practice of designating money for special projects through earmarks, they have not shied from using a less-well-known process called lettermarking to try to direct money to projects in their home districts.
…
Lettermarking, which takes place outside the Congressional appropriations process, is one of the many ways that legislators who support a ban on earmarks try to direct money back home.
In phonemarking, a lawmaker calls an agency to request financing for a project. More indirectly, members of Congress make use of what are known as soft earmarks, which involve making suggestions about where money should be directed, instead of explicitly instructing agencies to finance a project. Members also push for increases in financing of certain accounts in a federal agency’s budget and then forcefully request that the agency spend the money on the members’ pet project.
Because all these methods sidestep the regular legislative process, the number of times they are used and the money involved are even harder to track than with regular earmarks.
…
David E. Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, likened the effort to stamp out earmarks to a game of “Whack-a-Mole.”
“When one door closes, there is always two or three more that they can go through,” Mr. Williams said, adding that he feared that lawmakers would develop even less transparent ways to finance their special projects.
So not only will the wild spending to bring home the bacon for pet projects apparently continue unabated, it will be more difficult to track who is doing the spending and hold them accountable.
Wonderful.
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