Apr 30, 2009

Earmarked for Slander

Earmarks have a bad name, only partly deserved.

While they don’t represent ideal procedures for getting things in the U.S. Congress, they should not be put into the same barrel with pork.

Earmarks are sort of a low-fat version of pork; in some cases they are pork, but not always.

Earmarks are the way Congress does business, and while many think it’s the wrong way and subject to too much monkey business, the fact is no member of Congress can be expected to know everything about every item included in something as massive as the federal budget. It’s not really feasible for Congress to debate and vote, one by one, on every project that gets federal dollars.

I used to slander earmarks and was a great fan of Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, who invented the Golden Fleece Award and gave it monthly to the most egregious example of government waste. Had he been there (he retired from the Senate in 1989) for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the “bridge to nowhere” would easily have won a fleece.

But I have trouble criticizing the bridge to nowhere. I’ve been to Ketchikan, Alaska. It’s a town with just a few streets running north and south and none running east and west because, on the steep mountainside where the town is built, east-west streets are stairways. A bridge to Gavina Island would connect to level space, where Ketchikan’s airport is located. The only way there now is by boat. Not many people live on the island, but people do go there.

I learned a lesson a few years back when I found out that the horticulture industry had received an important earmark. Phytophthora rot was threatening the vegetable industry in several states in a serious way, and unless ways were found to contain it, a lot of land could have been permanently lost to vegetable production.

Scientists at Michigan State University and other universities, supported by the vegetable industry, went to their congressional delegations and got the money for research. They got an earmark.

That, I found out, is the way Congress does business.

Sometimes they attach their funding requests to unrelated bills. Sometimes they make deals with other members. If you’ll vote for my earmark, I’ll vote for yours. It’s a lousy way to do business, and needs reform, but that doesn’t make the projects that get earmarks bad.

Recently, the blueberry industry in Georgia got tarred with the earmark slander brush. Some $209,000 was earmarked to study ways to improve blueberry production in Georgia.

One of the problems with earmarks is that they sound bad to people who don’t know anything about the subject. Georgia is well on its way to becoming a major blueberry producer, and a whole lot of people there are working to carve new plantings out of pine woods that were probably growing cotton a century ago. They’re building a new industry from the ground up, solving basic problems like fertility, mulching, irrigation and drainage.

We need to know the truth about what’s in earmarks. The process by which members of Congress get their funding requests approved should be transparent, and somebody needs to scrutinize them. Earmarks are a bad way to get things done, but many of the projects they fund are valuable, worthwhile and needed in a timely way.