“Earmark” is the nondescript name given to a piece of pork-barrel spending. Yet, there is nothing innocuous about this type of outlay. Indeed, one reason federal spending has ballooned is that Members of Congress use earmarks to fund specific projects, businesses, and local governments, and this habit has grown out of control in recent years (below the Heritage Foundation has itemized this meteoric growth).

A perennial criticism of the Federal Government is that spending and tax legislation contain too many earmarks that would likely not become law if considered as a stand-alone bill. The persistence of these items in the Budget diverts resources from higher priority programs and undermines the necessary oversight of federal spending.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) puts it succinctly: “In 1994 there were 1,318 pork-barrel projects; in fiscal year 2005 there are an estimated 13,000 pork-barrel projects, an increase of 886 percent. Where are our priorities? And for what? So that members of the House and Senate can go home in an election year and brag about a peanut festival in Alabama or an indoor rain forest in Iowa.”

The recent Transportation Equity Act is a perfect example of this pathological appropriations process: the five-year, $286 billion bill was laden with more than 6,000 earmarks costing an amazing $24 billion. A $223 million bridge that would connect tiny Gravina Island in Alaska to nearby Ketchikan has been singled out by critics as an example of egregiously wasteful spending, as has $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Coralville, Iowa, $750,000 for grasshopper research in Alaska, and $100,000 to the Tiger Woods Foundation in Los Alamitos, California. As it works now, the appropriations process allows skillful politicians to send disproportionate sums of taxpayer dollars back to their states and districts without any citizen recourse.

Such abnormally comical spending is ruining the integrity of the budgetary process and ratcheting up spending.

Pork, however, is only the symptom of a much larger pathology. The real problem is runaway federal spending as a whole. A recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that in 2003, inflation-adjusted federal spending topped $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II. Overall for 2003, the federal government spent $20,300 per household, taxed $16,780 per household, and ran a budget deficit of $3,520 per household. Spending outside of defense and September 11-related expenses is increasing 5 percent annually. From 2001 through 2004, discretionary outlays are projected to have leaped 39 percent, from $649 billion to $900 billion. Excluding defense and September 11-related costs, discretionary spending increased 16 percent from 2001 through 2003.
What is more, discretionary spending has increased 39 percent since 2001. The question we all should be asking is, do these agencies really need such disproportionate spending increases year after year after year?

Similarly, it’s time the executive branch took more proactive action in curbing this disturbing spending trend. Congress could provide the President with a line-item veto, which gives authority to cut specific appropriated sums (like say a Bridge to Nowhere). Specifically, a modern line-item veto should be linked to deficit reduction, targeting hidden, non-germane pork projects that cost the taxpayers billions. This proposal would give the President the authority to defer new spending whenever it’s determined that it is not an essential Government priority. All savings from the line-item veto would be used for deficit reduction, and could not be applied to augment other spending. In the absence of such a veto, however, the President must still reject any bill with earmarks – indiscriminately – whatever the bill’s subject. The President cannot compromise.

These are much needed steps in the reform of the federal budgetary process. At the end of the day, if the shadowy earmark process is not reformed, federal spending will forever continue to grow, undermining the progress of the economy and the prosperity of America.

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