Busting Earmarks

Senators Coburn and Obama have a nice editorial in the Examiner touting the “Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act,” the just-passed bill that creates a search engine and database of federal spending. They make the point that this a first step, but an important one...

Giving taxpayers the ability to track more than $1 trillion in government contract and grant spending — including earmarks — by congressional district and keyword search opens the federal budget to the scrutiny Jefferson had in mind. The Federal Election Commission’s Web site has long given us information about which interests are contributing to which lawmakers, but this Web site can help us connect those dots one step further by detailing whether those lawmakers are repaying those interests with our tax dollars.

Our intent, though, is not to merely to guard against Abramoff-like acts of corruption, but to help taxpayers expose corruptions in our priorities, from Hurricane Katrina contracting abuse to self-interested pet projects.

In the Internet age, making this information available online should be automatic, which is why a vast array of interest groups, bloggers and commentators from both ends of the political spectrum joined forces to put public pressure on Congress when the bill was stalled.

Based on the following news, it's clear we need to keep working...

The annual Department of Defense appropriations bill is, by far, the single largest spending measure that Congress will pass this year. Every year, this enormous bill is a virtual treasure-trove in which members squirrel away pork projects to bring home to voters. While TCS will not complete a full analysis of this bill for a little while, the FY07 bill is clearly on its way to match or break the record earmark levels of the FY06 bill, which included 2,837 parochial and politically motivated earmarks worth $11.2 billion dollars. The RDT&E (Research, Development, Test and Evaluation) section of the bill contains 2,012 earmarks, comparing closely to the 2,070 earmarks in the same section of the FY06 bill.

Ironically, the first spending bill passed after the heralded and praised earmark transparency bill doesn't have a single lawmaker owning up to an earmark. All of the bill's $433.6 billion in spending has sailed through the new rule's wide-open loopholes. The only acknowledgement of the change is a small mention at the end of the conference report stating that no provisions meet the earmark criteria. Even the bill writers didn't say the bill didn't contain earmarks, just that none meet the definition outlined in the rule change.

Simply put, earmarking defense dollars dilutes the effectiveness of defense spending. Instead of funding programs relative to their necessity for national security, lawmakers are focused on protecting their local district's jobs and parochial pork. Programs should be funded relative to their national security merits, not the political muscle of the lawmaker supporting them.

(hat tip: Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette) what are some of these crucial national security earmarks, you ask? The left-wing dishrag notes a couple of them here...

Among the earmarks identified by Taxpayers for Common Sense were $1.7 million for photon research in upstate New York, care of Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, both Democrats, and $1.2 million for prostate cancer research involving DNA, a pet cause of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, who is chairman of the military spending subcommittee and once suffered from the disease.

Unless the photon research yields torpedos capable of taking out Iran, or the prostate cancer research is focused on giving Ahmadinijad a pain in the ass, I'm not sure how this is related to national security.