Posted March 20, 2008

By MARK MITTELSTADT

They've been blamed for some of the biggest boondoggles offered up on Capitol Hill: a $315 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska; a $50 million indoor rain forest in the heart of Iowa corn country; a museum at the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival.

Mark Mittelstadt

Bill Allison

Larry Makinson

Earmarks are the special requests for funding specific projects inserted by members of Congress in huge federal spending bills. The requests are often made with little fanfare and oversight, occasionally in the wee morning hours of conference committee deliberations. They nearly always are made outside of what federal agencies and departments themselves request as part of the budget process.

"Lawmakers love their earmarks," says Andrew Taylor, an Associated Press reporter in Washington who specializes in covering Congress and spending. "It's a way to prove their value to the voters back home and then try to do some good in their districts and states. It's also a way to make policy through the power of the purse instead of leaving all the decisions to bureaucrats."

Lawmakers, lobbyists and other interests defend the earmarks as a necessary tool of democracy, saying they reflect the unique character and needs of local companies, universities, governments, nonprofits and communities. But critics say many of the funded projects are an unnecessary waste of taxpayers' money.

Political pork or good public policy? This spring, the Associated Press Managing Editors is working with open government groups and newspapers nationwide to investigate and analyze the huge sums of money loaded into appropriation bills under the rubric of earmarks. We're using the latest in web-based research tools to track not only the earmarks, but also campaign contributions to members of Congress from individuals, companies and the lobbying firms they employ.

The AP Washington bureau will produce a national overview story to accompany the local stories fueled with federal data. That piece will be released the final week of May, and APME is encouraging newspapers to publish their work en masse during the weekend of June 7-8.

To ensure that reporters and editors understand how to navigate and download the different databases required to do the reporting, APME partnered with the Sunlight Foundation. Senior Fellow Bill Allison of Sunlight and his colleague Larry Makinson are leading the database training in 10 newsrooms across the country, and journalists from each of those regions are invited to participate. The one-day training seminars are free.

"This effort is illustrative of what APME does best – giving journalists the practical tools they need to do their jobs better," says David Ledford, executive editor of The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and president of APME. "It is an extension of our NewsTrain training program, and represents yet another step toward assisting editors as they move forward in the digital age. This is the 75th anniversary of APME, and we hope to have 75 newspapers participating in the en masse publishing of their reports. It has enormous potential and should be fun to do."

The first Sunlight NewsTrain workshop was held at The News Journal in mid-March in a packed house. "I've been doing database work for 20 years, and I found it enlightening because it teaches you how to drill down into the electronic muck to find real detail," Paul D'Ambrosio, investigations editor at the Asbury Park Press in Neptune, N.J. said afterwards. "Not just for earmarks, but core paper records for the earmarks, campaign contributions, all of which may ultimately lead you to a conflict of interest. Connecting the dots makes it valuable because you have a very linear line between taxpayer dollars and the companies getting those dollars."

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Allison is one the nation's best computer-assist instructors who worked with legendary reporters Donald Bartlett and James Steele to produce groundbreaking investigative reports, and with Charles Lewis, founder of the Center of Public Integrity. Sunlight is excited about the power of the APME partnership.

"Seventy-five papers printing stories on earmarks at a time when Congress will be in the middle of the next round of appropriations will have a huge impact," says Allison. "It will put the issue of earmarks front and center before the American people, most of whom don't like the practice, just when members are hoping to quietly serve up heaping new helpings of pork."

Another partner in the project, Taxpayers for Common Sense, reported that Congress inserted 12,881 earmarks into this year's spending bills for a whopping $18.3 billion. The number and total dollar amount is a 23 percent reduction from the high water mark of 2005, but congressional leaders had set a goal of reducing earmarks by 50 percent this year.

President Bush complained about the unchecked spending during his recent State of the Union speech. There is some talk in Congress about curtailing the practice, but resistance is expected to be fierce.

In its annual report issued in February, Taxpayers for Common Sense said public outcry on this issue stems from a concern "that earmarks are part of the pay-to-play culture where taxpayer money is diverted to reward campaign contributors, lobbyists, and cronies with pet projects."

But corruption and loss of public confidence are only part of the issue. "Earmarks redirect resources away from more important governmental activities, invariably increasing costs and waste and delaying the delivery of justified government services," the group said. It group cited a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which worried that in lean fiscal times earmarks "crowd out" desired increases in funding for competitively-awarded research programs.

The growth of the use of earmarks over the past two decades has been stunning. "In 1987, President Ronald Reagan vetoed a transportation appropriations bill because it had been stuffed with earmarks – some 121 of them," Allison says. "In 2007, one subsection of that same appropriations bill, which funds the Federal Highway Administration's Transportation Community System Preservation program, contained 331 earmarks; altogether, the bill had 1,437 of them."

While $18.3 billion is "a drop in the bucket" compared with overall federal spending, Allison says it's a lot of money to the companies, universities, state and local governments and nonprofits that seek earmarks. "To get them, some of these organizations hire well-connected lobbyists, make campaign contributions, and play the Washington influence game. Members benefit not only from the donations to their campaigns; they can also issue press releases about how they're bringing home the bacon, creating or saving local jobs with taxpayer dollars. It's a win-win for them."

When watchdog groups and others begin to dig into earmarks, many turn out to be for products or services that aren't wanted or needed. "When a federal agency spends money, it has to follow a meticulously designed set of rules called the Federal Acquisition Regulations," Allison explains. "There are all sorts of problems with FAR – but the regulations do try to make sure that the government isn't buying square pegs to go into round holes."

Members of Congress, on the other hand, can request earmarks without expert review or competitive bidding. One member, for example, earmarked millions of dollars to buy new transmission drip pans for Blackhawk helicopters before the Army had tested the pans to see if they wanted them. "If the Army decides the pans don't meet their needs, they'll end up in some government warehouse – unwanted junk stored at taxpayers' expense," Allison says.

Not all earmarks are bad. Taylor pointed to a bone marrow program that started as an earmark by Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla. Drone aircraft being used in Iraq and Afghanistan started out as an earmark, too.

Recipients of earmark funds often don't readily agree with the criticism. In his stump speeches, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ridicules $3 million inserted to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana. But a key researcher recently told the Washington Post the project has been a scientific success, finding more grizzlies than realized, results that may eventually lead to the bears being removed from the endangered species list.

"Earmark defenders say that under Congress' arcane budget process, reducing or eliminating earmarks only means that money would go somewhere else," Taylor explains. "But the flip side is that every dollar spent on earmarks is a dollar that can't be spent for some more worthwhile purpose. Lawmakers protested President Bush's cuts to medical research last year, but they could have easily reversed them if they hadn't larded the spending bill covering the National Institutes of Health with $1 billion worth of earmarks."

Critics have advocated a variety of reforms, from temporary moratoriums to an outright ban. A line-item veto would allow the President to ignore all earmarks. More than 20 House Republicans have pledged not to request earmarks in 2008, while dozens of members who do request funding started disclosing their requests online.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle, including Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) have proposed moratoriums on earmarks. McCain supports DeMint's effort. Other members want to keep earmarks "but bring greater transparency to the process," Allison says.

The training offered by the Sunlight Foundation in partnership with APME this spring is intended to help local reporters track the money and the interests behind them. The first workshop, held in Wilmington, attracted 20 reporters from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Washington. One participant, Mike Feeley, assistant managing editor for news at the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., said the training simplified "an extremely complicated process. There's still a lot of footwork to do, but now we have a clear direction on which way to go."

While the focus of earmarks is on Capitol Hill, Allison says earmarks "really are local stories with a Washington angle. Thanks to the array of online databases from government and nonprofit organizations, anyone with access to the Internet can do the Washington bit from anywhere in the country."

He says he doesn't know whether the APME reporting project will "jump-start" reform efforts. "But it might make members think twice about steering money to their political supporters, and most importantly, it will give member's bosses – the people – a good sense of how well their employees are performing," he says. "That in itself is a pretty good reason to do it."

Sandy Johnson, chief of AP's Washington bureau, says the project will be a "textbook example of government accountability reporting."

"At a minimum, it should produce the kind of watchdog journalism that is falling by the wayside as our industry contracts. Best case scenario: local reporters follow the money to expose corruption that deserves a look by prosecutors. There are plenty of congressmen under investigation and behind bars because they got caught at the intersection of power (them) and money (special interests)."

Mark Mittelstadt is executive director of the Associated Press Managing Editors. He can be reached at mmittelstadt@ap.org or (212) 621-1838.