Reports in the news (Pelosi Says She Would Drain GOP ‘Swamp‘) and on blogs suggest that the Democrats who are about to take control of Congress hope to rein in the practice of earmarking.
An article in the Washington Post last winter explained earmarking:
An earmark is a narrowly focused appropriation. …These home-state projects — which range from highways to research grants — now are commonplace in Congress’s 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government….
…Earmarks are supposed to go through a public process. Lawmakers, acting on a need in their districts or states, submit a written request to the appropriate congressional subcommittee and ask the panel’s members for support — in private and at an open hearing.
Instead, projects, many of which are never openly considered, are handed out as favors in exchange for votes on key pieces of legislation by party leaders and appropriations chairmen. Alternatively, earmarks are withheld as punishment when lawmakers fail to toe the party line. In addition, earmarks are regularly slipped into legislation at the very end of the process — during House-Senate conference deliberations.
Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said that 98 percent of the 3,000-plus earmarks added to a single appropriations bill last year were added in conference. Such last-minute earmarks are routinely included in a conference report that cannot be tampered with before final passage.
Schatz said that the proliferation of earmarks started after Republicans took control of the House in 1994. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) directed appropriators to help GOP lawmakers with tough reelection races by giving them projects they could boast about back home.
The amount of federal spending allocated by earmarking and other pork-barrel mushroomed during the 12 years of Republican control of Congress (see Washington Post graphic). Earlier this year Republicans instituted some reforms that were supposed to open the process a bit; I hope the newly elected Democrats are willing to go farther…
By hiring a DC lobbyist to the tune of $8000 a month (under a conract that runs until December 2007) Oak Ridge has “invested” heavily in buying influence to get earmarks. Reforms in the process would benefit US taxpayers, while making our city’s “investment” in lobbying services look even less worthwhile than it does already.
If reforms in earmarking come to pass, maybe the city can recoup some of our money by finding useful things for the hired DC political experts to do until the contract runs out. They were hired to help lure garden-variety transportation, recreation, and economic development grants, but Oak Ridge is a city with a major federal government presence that has created some unique problems. Could we use their help with those unique problems?
I’m bothered by (and have commented previously on) the City of Oak Ridge’s lobbying activities in Washington, DC. An article earlier this year in The New York Times, titled “Hiring Federal Lobbyists, Towns Learn Money Talks”, describes the disturbing national trend in which Oak Ridge is eagerly participating.
This hot trend is for local governments to hire professional lobbyists to help them gain Congressional “earmarks” — federal pork-barrel funding quietly inserted into bills, bypassing Congressional debate and the federal agency processes that are supposed to select projects for funding based on their merit (and priorities set by Congress).
According to the July 2, 2006, article:
Since 1998, the number of public entities hiring private firms to represent them in Washington has nearly doubled to 1,421 from 763…. Most of these new clients had never sought earmarks — some had never even heard of them — before someone knocked on their door, essentially offering big pots for a pittance. Others had read in the newspaper about neighbors with lobbyists building bridges or beach walks and felt pressure to keep up with the municipal Joneses. “We’re all in competition for the same dollars, and you want all the advantages you can have,” said John Litton, city manager in Lake Mary, Fla., about 20 miles north of Orlando.
The collective bill over eight years has topped $640 million. Enlisted almost exclusively to land earmarks, lobbyists for local governments have boomed alongside a broader explosion in such appropriations, to 12,852 items worth $64 billion last year from 4,219 pet projects totaling $27.7 billion in 1998. The prolific earmarking does not change the overall budget’s bottom line, but how the pie is cut: dollars are doled out, often in secret, at the whim of a lone legislator — often under the influence of a lobbyist — rather than through a competitive process.
It is against the law to use federal money to hire lobbyists. Yet local officials’ near-unanimous justification is that the lobbyists pay for themselves many times over through the infusion of federal funds.
Ronald D. Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a frequent critic of earmarks, said he was most troubled at seeing firms solicit public clients with virtual guarantees that they could deliver “dollars for pennies” (or billions for millions). “The mystery to me is the way they are able to promise returns,” Mr. Utt said, pointing to the revolving door between Congressional appropriators’ payrolls and lobby shops, as well as to lobbyists’ generous campaign contributions. “It goes beyond mere influence peddling to just outright, classic third-world corruption.”
Beyond any question of quid pro quo, some critics say the new ubiquity of private lobbyists paid with public money perverts basic democratic tenets. Of the 250 top-grossing firms in Washington, 48 have state, local and tribal governments as their leading source of revenue, far more than any other sector, according to the Center for Public Integrity, which monitors lobbying.
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, one of several Washington watchdog groups critical of earmarks, said it was local politicians’ mandate to make their needs known — and the job of members of Congress to look out for them.
“If you’re a mayor or a city councilman and you have to hire a lobbyist, what a gross admission of failure on your part,” Mr. Phillips said. “I would think they have a fiduciary responsibility to not put taxpayer dollars into lobbyists when they’re elected to be, really, the lobbyist for the people.”
The mayors and city council members, though, point to the special appropriations as proof of their fiscal prudence.
Alcalde & Fay is one of three firms — along with Patton Boggs and the Ferguson Group — that collected $25 million from public clients in the past eight years, much more than any other lobbyists. A close look at Alcalde & Fay’s 44 public clients in Florida alone shows that, since 2001, $9.8 million in lobbying fees translated into $173 million in earmarks, or a return of $18.41 on every dollar spent.
A snapshot analysis shows that hiring a lobbyist seems to help. North Miami Beach and Homestead, Florida, Alcalde & Fay clients with about 40,000 residents each, got a combined $13 million in earmarks in the past five years, while six cities of similar size got none. (Dunedin, population 35,691, lacked a lobbyist but got three earmarks totaling $2.7 million while its congressman, Mr. Young, ran the Appropriations Committee.)
Local leaders say they lack both the knowledge of bureaucratic procedures and the political contacts to navigate the complex world of federal appropriations. Besides, they are thousands of miles from Washington, picking up garbage and running recreation programs and putting police officers on beats.
Large governments — along with ports, airports and public utilities — have long had people in Washington looking out for their interests. What has changed in the past few years is the number of smaller entities looking to get in on the action.
The number of cities with lobbyists, for example, has grown to 511 from 234 in 1998, and the number of counties has also doubled, to 186 from 85. Fifty-nine public school districts had lobbyists last year, up from 19 in 1998, while the number of police and fire departments with their own paid representatives jumped to 16, from just 2.
One Congressional staffer told the Times (describing his boss):
“When asked the question whether a city or county needs to hire a lobbyist, he has always told them they don’t need to hire a lobbyist to work with their own congressman. That’s his job. Those are the people he was elected to represent. He doesn’t need to work through somebody else to schedule a meeting with a mayor or a city council member.”
In a July 10, 2006, editorial
Lobbyists, Yes. The People, Maybe the Times editorialist said:
The news that the Washington lobbying industry is rapidly extending its tentacles into cities, towns and school districts across the country should be an outright embarrassment to Congress. Elected lawmakers — not high-paid lobbyists — are supposed to be best attuned to meeting the needs of their localities. But not in the booming marketplace called earmarking — the rapid-fire, debate-free amending of budget bills with millions in special-interest boons for favored pleaders. In this case, lobbyists are shopping themselves as gifted middlemen for mayors and school boards. And localities are biting, having seen the sorry evidence that lawmakers tend to deliver earmarks more readily for Beltway lobbyists than for hometown nobodies.
In Florida, 44 public sector clients of one well-connected lobbyist netted $173 million in earmarked projects since 2001. This is a return of better than $18 federal dollars for every local dollar spent on lobbying, according to a report by Jodi Rudoren and Aron Pilhofer of The Times. The founding fathers surely didn’t envision such a lucrative warping of the federal-local relationship. But lawmakers do very well by it. They not only deliver tailored pork back home, but they also are rewarded by the circular money game where grateful lobbyists and special interests raise vast sums for the re-election campaigns of cooperative incumbents.
The City of Oak Ridge was one of only a handful of Tennessee local governments listed in the article as having lobbyist representation in Washington. Our current lobbyist, the Ferguson Group, named in that article as one of the lobbying firms that makes the most from local governments; their contract with Oak Ridge is worth more than $100,000 a year of local taxpayers’ money.
City officials claim that this is a winning arrangement for the city, because the size of the grants received exceeds the “investment” in the lobbying firm. On the contrary, I think the only winner in this arrangement is a booming political-manipulation industry in Washington, DC that we are supporting with our local dollars. We are paying these to manipulate the political process so we can get federal grants (for example, a DOT grant to complete the next phase of the Melton Lake Greenway) that we probably would qualify for anyway through normal agency processes (the same way we got previous grants for the greenway), and that generally still require that the city contribute local matching funds. This is a losing arrangement for taxpayers, and for the cause of good government, in general.
Interesting article in the New York Times — In the Voting Booth, Bias Starts at the Top. Stanford University researcher Jon A. Krosnick says:
Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into a 51 to 49 victory). In fact, in about half the races I have studied, the advantage of first place is even bigger — certainly big enough to win some elections these days.
He figures that people vote for the first name when they don’t know much about the candidates, or perhaps just want to get out of the voting booth faster.
With the new “Easy Slate” voting machines in our area, I expect this phenomenon will become more powerful. When I voted the other day, I noticed that after you enter your vote in a race, you are automatically moved to the first name on the list for the next race. You need to turn the dial to get to any other candidates. That makes it much easier to select the first name on the list…
According to the article, in partisan races Tennessee always lists the Democrat first, which presumably gives Democrats an automatic advantage. In nonpartisan races such as the Oak Ridge city elections, candidates always are in alphabetical order, which presumably will give an automatic advantage to candidates at the head of the alphabet.
The Times op-ed contributor thinks this should change:
Thankfully, the question of bias and name placement on ballots is finally beginning to get the attention it deserves. In August, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire declared unconstitutional the state’s procedure for listing first the names of candidates whose party had received the most votes in the preceding state general election.
Other states should solve this problem — particularly because an effective technique for name placement exists.
Ohio uses a system that is the model of fairness and accountability. Candidate names are rotated from precinct to precinct, so every candidate is listed first an equal number of times, and observers can inspect ballots on Election Day to be sure the rotation was done properly. Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming and a few other states use versions of this system.
That’s not to say that Ohio executes this system perfectly. For example, in 2004, with the permission of Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, many Ohio counties ignored the rotation law and listed John Kerry last twice as often as the law allowed. And also with Mr. Blackwell’s approval, Mahoning County’s touch-screen voting machines supposedly rotated candidate name order from voter to voter.
His recommendation is “We should acknowledge the wisdom of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and adopt the rotating name-ordering procedures throughout the country.” Makes sense to me! With electronic voting machines, I wonder if it would be feasible to rotate the names on the list in an individual voting machine, so different voters see a different version of the list. Unfortunately, I fear that the additional programming required to do that also would increase the chance of error or tampering in the voting process….
