David
Ledford

Big fees are paid to people to chase big government dollars, to throw parties for politicians who have the wherewithal to tap the taxpayers' till.

Virtually all business is done under the radar. There is no public or peer review of the projects being funded, no balancing act to determine if another idea, another cause, would better serve American taxpayers.

Welcome, fellow citizens, to the world of earmarks in the federal budgeting process, where the supremely connected and well-heeled fish in a sea of largess that in fiscal year 2008 was worth $18.3 billion – 11,234 earmarks worth $14.8 billion and another $3.5 billion with no sponsoring member of Congress identified.

Earmarks, for the uninitiated, are specific projects, contracts or grants not requested by the president but inserted as a line item into one of the annual appropriations bills. Many are tantamount to no-bid contracts.

Are they good public policy or political pork?

Today, scores of newspapers around America are examining this question through a partnership forged with the Associated Press, the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense. National newspapers like The New York Times and the Washington Post have looked hard at the pay-to-play corruption that spawned voter discontent in 2006 elections and last year forced better disclosure of earmarked projects and the members standing up for them.

I'm president of APME this year, and we worked hard to coordinate this national reporting project because we believe it's important for these issues to be probed deeper in places like Wilmington, Richmond, Va., Memphis, Tenn., Rochester, N.Y., Oakland, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Salt Lake City and Columbus, Ohio, to name a few spots where newspapers participated.

Nearly every member of Congress plays the earmark game, because to do otherwise would make one look ineffective. My hope is the local reporting fueled with federal data helps citizens nationwide understand this is the system our senators and representatives use to bring home the bacon – be it wasteful or worthy.

As reporting in The News Journal today shows, many of the Delaware projects are indeed worthy; you can judge for yourself by viewing the earmark database at delawareonline.com. I'm sure our colleagues nationwide also found meaningful work being done, and they, too, augmented their reportage with deep databases to help readers determine if money at home is being spent wisely.

It is a vexing issue. Grants funding cancer research hit the target. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens' bridge to nowhere is outrageous.

Why didn't Stevens' colleagues immediately call him on such a flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars? Because if one member criticizes another's earmarks, he may wake up one morning to find a torpedo headed toward pet projects in his state.

So even if the system stinks, members of Congress and many of their constituents hold their nose when help arrives at home.

The notion of digging deeper into earmarks started taking shape in my mind two years ago when The News Journal began investigating how a former lifeguard and lobbyist was able to spend millions of dollars on homes along Delaware beaches before being busted along with his partner, Jack Abramoff.

Michael Scanlon is a Washington-area resident who worked as a Bethany Beach lifeguard in high school and beyond. He served as press secretary for U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay before joining the once-powerful lobbyist Abramoff, now doing time in prison. Abramoff and Scanlon collected more than $80 million from tribes flush with casino money, and Scanlon used his take to build a real estate fortune in Delaware – paying cash for homes such as the $4.8 million, 7,000-square-foot oceanfront compound built in the 1940s by philanthropist Alexis Felix du Pont Sr.

Scanlon and Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud Indian tribes and bribe government officials.

I reasoned that if a press secretary-turned-lobbyist could amass that kind of money by working the halls of Congress, an institution Abramoff once called 'the favor factory,' The News Journal and other regional newspapers should look deeper.

We recruited the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison, one of the best database coaches in the country, to lead reporting seminars in a dozen cities around the country, and pulled journalists from each region to attend. In Wilmington, for example, we had 18 journalists from places like Harrisburg, Allentown and Doylestown in Pennsylvania and Asbury Park and Cherry Hill in New Jersey. National correspondents from papers in Salt Lake City and Baton Rouge, La., hopped on trains in Washington and came up to spend the day with us as well.

This effort not only put the light on a questionable spending practice, it also helped reporters nationwide learn how to make better use of the technological tools now available to them, to write with authority, hit with pinpoint accuracy.

It's the new frontier of the First Amendment, and we're happy to play a role in better informing the citizenry.

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David Ledford is the Vice President and Executive Editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. You can reach him at (302) 324-2860 or via e-mail at dledford@wilmingt.gannett.com.