House Fails to Cut Academic Earmarks from VA-HUD Bill

Despite the best efforts of pork barrel critics such as Rep. George Brown (D-California) and Rep. Harris Fawell (R-Illinois), Congress continues to divert money to specific projects in appropriations bills. A good example was during last month’s House consideration of H.R. 4624, the VA, HUD Independent Agencies Appropriations Bill for FY 1995. When given the chance to agree to $290 million in earmarked spending, the House said “yea” by a vote of 189-180.

House approval of this funding in the final legislation was in direct contrast to its own version of H.R. 4624, which contained no earmarking. After the Senate Appropriations Committee completed its work on the House bill, earmarking jumped from zero to $135 million. The final conference committee, comprised of members from both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, earmarked a total of $290 million. Criticizing this action, Brown declared, “This is an arcane branch of mathematics whereby the compromise between zero and 135 million [dollars] actually works out to be 290 million [dollars].” Last year, appropriations subcommittee chairmen Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) agreed not to earmark funding for unauthorized site-specific projects. The FY 1993 VA-HUD appropriations bill (passed in 1992) contained $260 million in special purpose grants.

Brown was particularly disappointed with the $68 million+ in earmarks to academic institutions, almost 25% of the total figure. These projects come in the agency budgets overseen by his science committee. Referring to the lack of oversight by authorizing committees, Brown stated: “This process will destroy the comity of this House. This will destroy the sense of the members of the authorizing committee that they are coequal members of this particular branch of Government. They are ruining our relationship with the Senate, because as I pointed out, most of this originates in the Senate, and our dear friends on the House Appropriations Committee are almost forced into playing the same game with them, because they could not afford to be out of line with the Senate colleagues.”

Brown calculates that about one-half of the earmarked money in this bill is targeted to the eight states represented by twelve members of the conference committee. Those states, receiving $10 million or more of this money are:

New York $25.40 million
West Virginia 23.00
California 21.90
Ohio 17.75
Pennsylvania 17.35
New Jersey 13.49
Michigan 10.45
Maryland 10.15