Earmarks

Eakinomics: Earmarks And the hits just keep on coming…back. First inflation; next a new Cold War; raising from the (properly) dead, the windfall profits tax; and now…earmarks. If you’ve been pining for the sweet beauty of the Bridge to Nowhere, the Cornhusker Kickback, or other hits from the golden age of pork, this Eakinomics is for you. Earmarks – what the late Senator John McCain called “the gateway drug to corruption and overspending in Washington” – are back. But these are not your daddy’s earmarks; indeed, they now are known by the more genteel designation, “Community Project Funding”! By any name they are popular. Gordon Gray, in his review of the revival movement, notes: “The current Congress has reinstituted earmarking and Congress has embraced the practice with bicameral, bipartisan enthusiasm, with over 3,000 earmark requests in the House, and over 8,000 earmark requests in the Senate for fiscal year 2022.” There is actually a fair amount to understand about earmarks, and the Gray piece is a great place to start. To begin, it is devilishly hard to define an earmark. It reminds me of the difficulty in defining pornography, and I think this similarity is far from coincidental. Earmarks also raise the specter of deals struck in smoke-filled back rooms. This is far from the case. Earmark requests are now quite transparent: “The new requirements in the House and Senate are similar, and require additional disclosures from legislators and the committees. The new rules also limit earmarks to ‘1 percent of discretionary spending,’ although how that will be policed is unclear. While the earmark ban that prevailed in Congress for a decade was a significant initiative for the incoming House Republican majority in 2010, the restoration of earmarking has bipartisan appeal. According to the House Appropriations Committee database, 332 House Members requested 3,018 earmarks totaling $7.1 billion. In the Senate, 64 Senators requested 8,071 earmarks.” The argument for bringing back earmarks is that they are a way to grease the wheels of the appropriations process. So it is ironic that the vehicle for their return is an omnibus appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2022 – which started six months ago – and which only squeaked over the finish line by jettisoning funding for COVID-19 relief because it committed the sin of (partially) cutting other spending to pay for it. Don’t you just love the smell of good-government cooking? It is hard to get excited about the return of earmarks. There is little reason to believe they will be a panacea for pervasive budgetary malfeasance and appropriations dysfunction. And it is even less likely that the road to purifying congressional souls runs through earmarks.