Republicans, Democrats, and Appropriators…and Pork
I’m sympathetic to the oft-repeated saying that there are really three parties in Washington: Republicans, Democrats, and Appropriators. This situation is likely to be demonstrated this evening when Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee provide enough votes for Democratic Sen. Harry Reid to close off debate and proceed to final passage of the pork-laden $410 billion fy2009 omnibus appropriations bill.
Greasing the skids for bigger government will be almost $8 billion in earmarks contained in the bill. Fox News is pointing out that almost all of the Republican Senators expected or likely to support the Democratic measure stand to deliver quite a bit of pork to constituents and special interests. Not coincidentally, all of the senators named, except Sen. Snowe of Maine, are appropriators. As a matter of fact, if you look at the top 20 senators (both parties) in terms of dollars of earmarks secured for this bill, 15 are appropriators.
Bottom line: Appropriators love spending and they particularly love pork. Sen. Snowe just likes the government spending other people’s money.
**Update: Cloture was invoked on a 62-35 vote and the legislation subsequently passed by voice vote. Every single Democratic member of the Senate Appropriation Committee voted for cloture. Republican appropriators Sens. Cochran, Specter, Bond, Shelby, Alexander, and Murkowski voted yes; Sens. McConnell, Gregg, Bennett, Hutchison, Brownback, Collins, and Voinovich voted no. Thus, without the support of these Republican appropriators, the bill would have been effectively killed. Of the top 20 recipients of earmarks in the bill, only 2 — Sens. Inhofe and McConnell — voted no.
FutureGen: Economic and Political Decisions
People who support expanded federal intervention into areas such as energy and health care naively assume that policymakers can make economically rational and efficient decisions to allocate resources. They cannot, as a Washington Post story today on FutureGen illustrates.
The story describes the political battle over the location of a $1.8 billion ”clean coal” plant. I don’t know where the most efficient place to site such a plant is, or if such a plant makes any sense in the first place. But the story illustrates that as soon as such decisions are moved from the private sector to the political arena, millions of dollars are spent to lobby the decisionmakers, and members of Congress are hopelessly biased in favor of home-state spending regardless of what might be best for the national economy as a whole.
President Obama has promised to ramp up spending on such green projects. So get ready for some huge political fights over the big-dollar spoils, and get ready for some monsterous energy boondoggles.
Republicans and Earmarks
This week, a handful of fiscally conservative Republican senators have been trying to cut earmarks out of the $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the legislation contains 8,570 earmarks worth $7.7 billion.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has sought to strike specific items, like the $200,000 earmark for Tattoo Removal Violence Prevention Outreach Program in Burbank, California and the $1.9 million earmark to the Pleasure Beach Water Taxi Service in Connecticut.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has taken a broader approach by introducing an amendment to strike all earmarks from the bill and revert to last year’s spending levels.
Not surprisingly, they have been unsuccessful. And given recent events, one must wonder if these efforts by fiscal conservatives are even welcomed by members of their own party.
The amendments introduced by Coburn and McCain were defeated by opposition from not only by the majority of Democratic senators, but also many Republican appropriators, like Senators Thad Cochrane (R-MS) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
And despite his occasional anti-earmark rhetoric and support for the Coburn and McCain amendments, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is one of the chief beneficiaries of the earmark-laden omnibus bill. Reports suggest he requested either $75 or $51 million for his home state of Kentucky. Either way, he will obtain far more than his Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), whose earmark requests total $26 million.
Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has been fairly consistent in her criticism of the earmarking process and, for the most part, has voted accordingly. Proving that Republican affection for earmarking is a bicameral phenomenon, her stance attracted ire from Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO), formerly one of the highest-ranking Republicans in House, who said he “would hope that Claire would change her mind on this,” as he praised Senator Kit Bond’s (R-MO) prowess at earmarking.
Now, earmarks make up a relatively small slice of the overall budget, but as Coburn has noted, the problem with earmarks is ‘‘the hidden cost of perpetuating a culture of fiscal irresponsibility. When politicians fund pork projects they sacrifice the authority to seek cuts in any other program.”
For more on earmarks, check out the “Corporate Welfare and Earmarks” chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.
Science: The Final (Budget) Frontier
There are many people who think that little or no “science” will get done — at least “basic” science that has no evident, immediate, practical applications — unless the federal government pays for it. That is a dubious proposition, but it’s not what really alarms me right now. What really troubles me is that scientists, apparently, can conceive of no end to research worthy of your hard-earned dollars, and see things in Washington looking a lot friendlier to their exploring the final, spending frontier. This quote from an article in Inside Higher Ed today says it all:
Pressed by [Rep. Alan] Mollohan and others for how much money the government ought to be spending on science research and education, [National Academy of Sciences President Ralph J.] Cicerone was clearly reluctant to throw out figures; danger loomed that he would look either greedy or unambitious in appearing to speak for the science establishment.
But he made clear that he would welcome a way of ensuring growth for federal spending on science, perhaps, he said, through a mechanism that tied spending to “the number of highly competitive proposals” agencies receive, to ensure that there is enough money to cover all research proposals that scientific peer review processes grade above a certain level.
When Mollohan asked what was the appropriate “end point” for growth in federal science funds, Cicerone said that “we are so far away from that level that it’s hard to say.”
So science can tell us a lot, but not how far we are from adequate science funding. I, however, can put it in a little perspective: In 2006 the federal government spent more than $31 billion on research at ”educational institutions.” If the funding end point is, say, Saturn, then to at least some scientists it seems we haven’t even gotten to the moon.
Get ready for scientists to blast off with your wallets anytime now.
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