Brown Continues Crusade Against Earmarking
“The efforts of the Administration, Congressional authorizing committees, and the academic communities to set research priorities for the nation will run aground on the shoals of earmarking.” -- Report by the Chairman of the House Science Committee
House science committee chairman George Brown (D-California), a crusader against earmarking of academic research and facilities, continues his efforts to raise the subject’s visibility with a new report, released August 9. “Academic Earmarks: An Interim Report by the Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology” includes preliminary results of a survey of institutions receiving recent earmarks, and offers a trio of recommendations to help stem the flood of unauthorized projects.
The 23-page report defines earmarks (also known as “pork-barrel”) as “appropriations that are tied to specific locations or institutions and which have not been requested by an Executive Branch Department, approved by the President and included in his budget, and/or included in authorizing legislation approved by the House and Senate and signed by the President.” The report states that the practice, negligible prior to the 1980s, has caught on rapidly: Academic earmarks have risen from $10.7 million in 1980 to $708.0 million in 1992.
Brown’s report argues that earmarking does not systematically reward deserving smaller schools by circumventing an elitist peer-review system, as is often claimed. Instead, it states that in fiscal year 1992, “10 of the top 20 recipients of competitively awarded federal research dollars [were] among the recipients of earmarks.” Most of the pork goes to institutions in states represented by powerful Members of Congress, regardless of how those states fare in peer-reviewed competition.
In addition, the report warns that earmarked funds are “beginning to eat into the base programs of the federal agencies,” and forcing agencies to fund programs deviating from their original missions. For example, the report cites earmarks requiring DOE to build medical facilities. “During the four years that the Department of Energy spent $171.8 million on hospitals,” it says, “the Superconducting Super Collider’s appropriations were falling $282 million short of its baseline.” In addition, pork-barrel projects rarely have any quality control or accountability, and usually do not effectively leverage taxpayers’ dollars.
The committee sent a questionnaire to 50 schools known to have received earmarks in the fiscal 1993 appropriations process. While a final report is expected to be released in September, this interim report provides some preliminary insights. The report finds “little or no competition in awarding the money nor any weighing of merit of [the schools’] desired earmark versus other possible uses of the federal money.” In addition, it says, “the responses reveal an amazing amount of confusion about what peer review is and what it means to have an `authorized’ program, a point that [the committee] would have hoped most university presidents would remember from their high school civics class.”
The process is supposed to work like this: Authorizing committees provide oversight and approve federal agency programs for funding; then appropriators provide funding for the authorized programs. However, for various reasons, this procedure is regularly ignored. Some authorizing legislation is never passed, due in part to the fact that Senators, who (unlike their counterparts in the House) can sit on both authorizing and appropriations committees, often see no need for both pieces of legislation. Another common occurrence is that, after the House and Senate each pass their version of an appropriations bill, conferees meet behind closed doors to reconcile differences, and often add and trade projects to get deals made. In a battle on the House floor last year, Brown was successful in getting ten pork projects removed from the energy and water appropriations conference report, just to see them reappear in the DOD report (see FYI #160, 1992.)
Brown offers three recommendations intended to help curb earmarking: (1.) The House rules should be changed to prohibit location-specific earmarks in appropriations bills or reports, and House authorizing committee chairs should have more say in dealing with Senate-added amendments. (2.) Authorization bills should specifically prohibit federal agencies from obligating funds which have been appropriated but not authorized, and agencies should refuse any appropriations that are only earmarked in the (non-binding) reports rather than in the bills themselves. (3.) To reduce the need for earmarking of facilities, well-funded, competitive facilities programs should be established within both NSF and NIH.
A copy of the report can be obtained from the House science committee at 202-225-4275.
