Earmarks -- Some Answers For Andrew, And For The Heritage Foundation

Andrew...welcome back.  You were missed.

You ask: "The question is whether further progress against that tendency could be made if the cover of earmarks were taken away.  What do you say, Stan?"

Actually, I'm convinced that the opposite would happen.  No earmarks in a spending bill would mean the fight for money for a district or state would be waged at the agency or department that gets the funds rather than on the Hill.

In other words, your question only considers half of the equation.  Yes, there would be no winners when the bill was considered on the floor of the House or Senate.  But there would also be no losers.  That means that more people would likely have an incentive to vote for a spending bill because there would still be a possibility that the funds their constituents wanted could be obtained later in the process.

Because everything was still possible when the bill was debated and voted on, a member of Congress would be able to tell their voters that he or she was still fighting to get the funds for the project they wanted.  In fact, the only way to be sure the project wasn't funded would be by voting against the bill.

You also ask, "Why should these bureaucrats be appointed by the President as opposed to the Congress?"

There are two answers.  First, the senior-most staff in most agencies and departments in effect are appointed by Congress, or at least by the Senate, in the sense that those nominations require confirmation.  Second, federal employees below the presidential nominee level are generally civil servants who, in theory, are not supposed to be swayed by the political considerations of the president (We can all take a moment to smile knowingly here).

On top of everything else, do you really want executive branch employees appointed by Congress?  That seems to me like a recipe for total stalemate and constitutional disaster.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog yesterday tried to take me to task by quoting a single member of the Senate quoting another single member of Congress and using a table that it admits might not really prove anything.  My response: see above.  Representatives and senators will have at least as much incentive to vote for a bill without earmarks as they do when earmarks are included.  Nice try.

But let's go back to the basic point: Repeat after me: cutting earmarks doesn't reduce the size of the appropriation and, therefore, lower federal spending.  Saying, or in the case of the Heritage Foundation's Foundry, wishing it did, doesn't make it so.