Trashing earmarks is a popular pastime on both sides of the political spectrum. Earmarks, or “pork projects” as they are often referred to, are decried as wasteful spending, bribes, slush money, and everything else that is wrong with the democratic process. I am always puzzled by these complaints: there is something wrong with earmarks, but it’s not the problem that people generally think.
First, a quick primer on earmarks: it’s the job of Congress (and state legislatures) to appropriate money to pay for government. Lots of times, this money is appropriated in large blocks to various government agencies, such as the Department of Transportation, Department of Education, and so forth. The bureaucrats who run those agencies then disburse money based on laws, rules, and their own departmental procedures. For example, the Minnesota Department of Transportation decides every year what road projects they will undertake with the money they have. The department makes this decision, not the legislature. An earmark, on the other hand, is when a legislature directs money specifically to a project, bypassing the bureaucracy.
Although appropriating money to government agencies works well most of the time, it’s not 100% perfect. Since these agencies are run by unelected appointees, they are not terribly susceptible to public pressure. Sometimes, the public may desire something that the department’s procedures think is unnecessary. Moreover, it always remains the prerogative of the legislature or Congress to appropriate all money; an earmark is no less valid than a block appropriation.
Sure, some earmarks may sound ridiculous to the layman, such as half a million dollars to study salmon DNA. But it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind when hearing these stories on the news or these jokes on late-night television. First, since the people making these reports are obviously trying to gin up outrage over earmarks, they are going to select the most absurd-sounding projects they can find; far more projects are just ignored because they sound too reasonable. Second, these reports often have just one side of the story. Salmon genetics may sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but if a certain district relies on salmon farming for a lot of their business income and the people in that district think this project would help them out, of course the person representing that district in Congress is going to push for it to benefit his or her constituents.
Not all earmarks are worthwhile projects, of course: some of them are attempts to pay off campaign contributors or business associates. So how do we tell the good from the bad? By fixing the real problem with earmarks: the process is not nearly transparent enough. In the 21st century, it is certainly possible to create a report of all earmarks requested by our elected officials, and make such a report easily accessible to the public, so that voters can judge for themselves what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s also possible for all earmark requests to be made public and announced beforehand. What’s stopping these reforms is politics: not all politicians want their actions to be illuminated by the sunshine of greater transparency. They’d prefer to maintain the status quo of inserting earmarks when nobody is looking and not having to answer for their actions. Sadly, this doesn’t serve the democratic process.
Governments should be as close to 100% transparent as possible. While there may have been technological hurdles to achieving this goal in the past, today there is no excuse other than politics. By making the earmark process completely transparent, voters can punish those politicians that abuse the process and reward those that act responsibly. Everybody will be better off.