Say Anything Blog

What if some of the money spent for “earmarks” (pork designated by members of Congress for their own districts), was available to actually, I don’t know, fix things?

An interesting point brought up on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. This article points out the folly of many Congressional “earmarks”, where funding specified for “pet” projects go unspent because of more urgent priorities. Meanwhile, because they are designated for specific projects, they can’t be spent where they are desperately needed!

In the 1981 highway bill, there were all of 10 earmarks. A decade later there were 1,850, and by 2005 the earmarks had multiplied to 6,371, or nearly 10% of total spending.

Alaska alone received 119 earmarks in the 2005 highway bill, worth $941 million. To put a sharp point on the matter of spending priorities: The $250 million in emergency appropriations now flying through Congress for Minnesota is slightly more than half the amount appropriated to Alaska for the ”Bridge to Nowhere” and “Don Young’s Way,” two of the more infamous earmarks from the 2005 bill.

A main problem with these earmarks is that they often supersede the more urgent repair and replacement needs identified by state and local officials. Earmarked funds in past highway bills would go unspent because the vanity projects were unwanted and typically require some state matching funds. A full five years after the 1987 transportation bill, for example, no less than 64% of its earmarked money was still unspent because states had more urgent priorities for their share of the spending. By 1997, 55% of the $6.2 billion in earmarks from the 1991 highway bill had gone unspent. We can’t report the same numbers for the 1998 and 2005 highway bills because the federal Transportation Department stopped disclosing the figures, lest it embarrass Members of Congress.