User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Bibliography Earmarks (Politics)

Bibliography Earmarks (politics)

Keywords: distributive politics, legislative policymaking, legislative earmarking, majority party, minority party, political science, political representation, partisan politics, House appropriators, appropriation, bicameral appropriations politics, pork barrel, pork barrel politics, partisanship, blame avoidance, legislative pork, majority coalitions, swing voters, geographic politics, U.S. House of Representatives, coalition building, distribution of benefits, defense spending, political coalitions, executive earmark, legislative earmark, presidential earmark,

Definition

Earmarks or congressional earmarks are provisions inserted into a discretionary budget or appropriation legislation that recommend, authorize or direct a specific amount that benefits a targeted recipient, project, program and/or locality by the legislative or executive branches of government in a way that circumvents the administrative formula-driven, merit-based or competitive funds allocation process.

In 2006 the most powerful Congressional committees, the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the House Committee on Appropriations, which controlled $843 billion a year in discretionary spending in 2006, earmarked tens of billions of dollars. The bills passed by the Appropriations Committee regulate expenditures of money by the government of the United States. As such, it is one of the most powerful of the committees, and its members are seen as influential. The Senate Appropriations Committee is the largest committee in the U.S. Senate, with 30 members in the 114th Congress. Its role is defined by the U.S. Constitution, which requires "appropriations made by law" prior to the expenditure of any money from the Treasury, and is, therefore one of the most powerful committees in the Senate.

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee has enormous power to bring home special projects (sometimes referred to as "pork barrel spending") for his or her state as well as having the final say on other senators' appropriation requests.^[2] For example, in fiscal year 2005 per capita federal spending in Alaska, the home state of then-Chairman Ted Stevens, was $12,000, double the national average. Alaska has 11,772 special earmarked projects for a combined cost of $15,780,623,000. This represents about four percent of the overall spending in the $388 billion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005 passed by Congress. From Wikipedia articles on United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

Value of Earmarks

Based on the 2006 CRS report the comparative total value of earmarks from 1994 to 2005 was,

($billion)

year	CAGW	CRS
1994	$7.8	$23.2
1996	$12.5	$19.5
1998	$13.2	$27.7
2000	$17.7	32.9
2002	$20.1	42.0
2004	$22.9	$45.0
2005	$27.3	$47.4

Debate

Those in favor of earmarks argue that the 2010 ban "has tied the hands of congressional leaders."

"Still, earmarks, despised by reformers on the left and right, served an essential political purpose. The House and Senate leadership and ranking committee members used earmarks to persuade their reluctant colleagues to vote for or against key bills; they used them as a tool to forge compromise and as a carrot to produce majorities. The prohibition on earmarks has done nothing to restore respect for Congress. Just the opposite: It has contributed to legislative gridlock and increased the difficulty of winning enactment of tax and immigration reform."

— Thomas Edsall The New York Times 2014

For many years earmarks were a core aspect of legislative policymaking and distributive politics - an essential political instrument whereby political coalitions were forged through compromise in order to pass or reject key legislation. As congressional earmarks came into disfavor and eventually were prohibited, the ban "contributed to legislative gridlock and increased the difficulty of winning enactment of tax and immigration reform."

Compared to congressional earmarks which are most often found in published spending bills, presidential or executive earmarks are more difficult to track. Supporters of the practice argue that they are used in distributive politics to help form political coalitions by rewarding swing voters. Detractors call the process pork barrel politics.

"Earmarks are funds provided by the Congress for projects, programs, or grants where the purported congressional direction (whether in statutory text, report language, or other communication) circumvents otherwise applicable merit-based or competitive allocation processes, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the executive branch to manage its statutory and constitutional responsibilities pertaining to the funds allocation process."

— OMB 2010

History

The verb 'to earmark' derives from the "old herdsman’s practice of cutting a notch in the ears of swine or cattle as a mark of ownership."

1817 The earliest examples of pork barrel politics in the United States was the Bonus Bill of 1817, legislation proposed by John C. Calhoun to earmark the revenue "bonus", as well as future dividends, from the recently established Second Bank of the United States for an internal improvements fund. which was introduced by Democrat John C. Calhoun to construct highways linking the Eastern and Southern United States to its Western frontier using the earnings bonus from the Second Bank of the United States. Calhoun argued for it using general welfare and post roads clauses of the United States Constitution. Although he approved of the economic development goal, President James Madison vetoed the bill as unconstitutional." **In Wikipedia's pork barrel politics article.

Antebellum period In 19th century households in the Antebellum period, "a barrel of salt pork was a common larder item in 19th century households, and could be used as a measure of the family's financial well-being."

"I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel."

— James Fenimore Cooper. 1845. The Chainbearer

1863 "In the popular 1863 story "The Children of the Public", Edward Everett Hale used the term pork barrel as a homely metaphor for any form of public spending to the citizenry." (Cited in Wikipedia article Pork barrel politics

1870s After the American Civil War, "pork barrel politics" came to be used in a derogatory sense. By the 1870s, references to "pork" were common in Congress, and the term was further popularized by a 1919 article by Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review, which reported on certain legislative acts known to members of Congress as "pork barrel bills". He claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving slaves a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout.

• The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term from 1873.

1991 - 2006 "One of the most famous alleged pork-barrel projects was the Big Dig in Boston, Massachusetts. The Big Dig was a project to relocate an existing 3.5-mile (5.6 km) section of the interstate highway system underground. The official planning phase started in 1982; the construction work was done between 1991 and 2006; and the project concluded on December 31, 2007. It ended up costing US$14.6 billion, or over US$4 billion per mile. Tip O'Neill (D-Mass), after whom one of the Big Dig tunnels was named, pushed to have the Big Dig funded by the federal government while he was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. (Cited in Wikipedia article Pork barrel politics).

1994Before 1994 earmarks represented less than $7.8 billion a year. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service "counted 15,877 in the 13 appropriations bills for fiscal 2005, nearly four times the number in 1994, near the end of Democrats' long majority control of Congress."

1994 Republicans received their first majority in four decades in 1994. Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste 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." According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, when Earmarks represented $29 billion in 1994.

In 2005, the United States Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that contained a $442 million earmark for constructing two Alaskan bridges. Pushed forward by Alaska Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, the Gravina Island Bridge was intended to provide a link between the Ketchikan airport on Gravina Island and the city of Ketchikan at a cost of $233 million in federal grant money. It received nationwide attention as a symbol of pork-barrel spending. Since Gravina Island only had a population of 50, the bridge became known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Senator John McCain denouncing of projects like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere focused attention on congressional earmarks. McCain challenged the "$233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it.” In 2005 "earmarks made headlines when Alaska lawmakers won a $223 million appropriation for a single bridge between the town of Ketchikan and the even smaller Gravina Island. Under pressure, the "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark was withdrawn.

2005 Randy Cunningham "a former Republican congressman from California who steered military contracts in exchange for bribes and luxury goods" pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion. He was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison and was ordered to pay $1.8 million in restitution.

In January 2006, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress examined how President Bush earmarked special projects favored by the President and the Laura Bush, such as the $24 million in grants to train librarians through the 21st Century Librarian program. "While the Education Department's budget would be cut, Mr. Bush proposes a 16% increase to $204 million for teaching sexual abstinence in high schools, a popular cause for social conservatives... the Corps of Engineers items and 'faith-based' initiatives."

"The president's earmarks are harder -- if not impossible -- to tally. Many appear only in closely held supplements separate from the public budget books. Also, as head of the executive branch, the president often doesn't need earmarks: Once federal agencies get funding from Congress, his appointees are fairly free to steer sums to places, programs and vendors as the administration decides -- from Pentagon contracts to this year's $100 million Teacher Incentive Fund, another priority of Mrs. Bush."

— Jackie Calmes Wall Street Journal February 21, 2006

Congressional earmarks "compared with the president's -- are relatively simple to find in spending bills and their companion committee reports." President Tom Schatz of the conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste, which publishes the annual "Pig Book" of congressional earmarks, said presidential earmarks are "difficult to track."

February 2006 According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, in 2006, the number of earmarks increased from "4,155 valued at $29 billion in 1994 to 14,211 worth $53 billion a decade later." In early 2006 Congress sought to improve its image after the Jack Abramoff cash-for-favors scandal. "Earmark reform" was the "element common to ethics legislation offered by Democrats and Republicans at that time.

February 2006 In his State of the Union speech in February 2016, President Bush said, "I am pleased that the members of Congress are working on earmark reform because the federal budget has too many special interest projects."

February 2006 House Majority Leader John Boehner, who was elected to replace [Tom DeLay]] on February 2, 2006, who was forced to resign as House Leader after being indicted on criminal charges, campaigned on earmark reform and reining in government spending. Beohner replaced [Tom DeLay]], who was forced to resign as House Leader after being indicted on criminal charges.

"It's the revolving door that helps perpetuate the cozy world of lobbying for such favors as earmarks—the suddenly controversial system by which the House and Senate Appropriations Committees dish out tens of billions of dollars in pork from the $843 billion a year in discretionary spending they doled out for this year. President Bush and new House Majority Leader John Boehner are now calling for reform of the clubby earmark game."

— Time February 2006

2006 In 2006, Congress controversially appropriated nearly $500,000 in federal funding for construction of a new building for the Sparta Teapot Museum, but the project was canceled before any of the money left federal hands.

Janury 2006 In 2006 the Congressional Research Service (CRS) compiled a report on the use of earmarks in thirteen Appropriation Acts from 1994 through 2005 in which they noted that there was "not a single definition of the term earmark accepted by all practitioners and observers of the appropriations process, nor [was] there a standard earmark practice across all appropriation bills." The CRS did not aggregate the "varying definitions" as the result would be invalid.

"There is not a single definition of the term earmark accepted by all practitioners and observers of the appropriations process."

— Report by the Congressional Research Service January 26, 2006

September 14, 2007 "Earmark disclosure rules in both the House and Senate were implemented with the stated intention of bringing more transparency to congressionally directed spending." The Senate included this rule in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, which became law on September 14, 2007 (Section 521 of P.L. 110-81, 121 Stat.760). new congressional earmark disclosure requirements

September 2007 "Interestingly, in the wake of 2007’s new congressional earmark disclosure requirements, some members of Congress have found this type of executive earmark particularly helpful in their efforts to divert funds to their preferred projects, while still being able to claim their legislation to be “earmark-free.” As Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) has explained, a member of congress lobbying an executive branch official on behalf of his constituents does not technically have to register his requests as earmarks, even if the end result is the same."

2007 Congressional members and DOT administration often disagree on priorities. In FY2007, a year in which Congress passed a year-long continuing resolution and the appropriators did not earmark the discretionary programs, the George W. Bush Administration decided to consolidate virtually all discretionary funds in the highway and transit programs to advance its focus on comprehensive congestion mitigation strategies in metropolitan areas through urban partnership agreements. The roughly $850 million in discretionary funding was divided among just five cities.In FY2007, with an earmark ban in place, President Bush's Administration's divided about $850 million in discretionary funding to five metro areas, Miami, Florida, Minneapolis, Minnesota, San Francisco, California, and Seattle, Washington through the Urban Partnership Agreement.

2008 John Murtha (D-Penn.), who chaired the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee from 1989 to 1995 and again in 2006 and served as its ranking member from 1995 to 2007, and "fellow panel members Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.) provided earmarks to The PMA Group long list of clients. In return and those clients and PMA staf contributed to the lawmakers' political campaigns. The PMA Group had a "long list of clients" who received defense earmarks, "often no-bid contracts that federal agencies feel pressure to award companies selected by individual lawmakers." In 2008 alone lawmakers gave PMA Group clients 172 earmarks in the defense bill. In a 2009 article the Wall Street Journal called Murtha "one of Congress's most unapologetic earmarkers." According to the Pennsylvania Report, Murtha was one of "Pennsylvania’s most powerful congressmen" and a "master of crossing the aisle and bringing pork into his district."

"The House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee is widely considered the key House panel funding the Pentagon. Fully 12 of the subcommittee’s 16 members were involved in the controversial practices."

— The Center for Public Integrity. September 9, 2009

2008 According to a review by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group, Wasilla (a town of 6,700 residents) benefited from $26.9 million in earmarks in Sarah Palin's final four years in office. According to reporting by ABC News, however, Wasilla only directly received $7.95 million, and the $26.9 million figure refers to the amount the entire Matanuska-Susitna Borough received.

2008 Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE).

2008 "Both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama list further slashing earmarks and increasing transparency in the earmarking process as priorities on their presidential campaign websites."

2009 In the spring of 2009, the House began an investigation into seven members of the House subcommittee on defense spending, including its chairman the late John Murtha. The matter went over to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), an independent body which included former Members Abner Mikva, Bill Frenzel and Porter Goss. In 2010 the OCE found no wrong-doing on the part of Murtha, James Moran (D-Va.), Norman Dicks (D-- Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), and C.W. Young (R-Fla.) but recommended further inquiry into Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). However, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct announced in March 2010 that it found no evidence "that members or their official staff considered campaign contributions as a factor when requesting earmarks." Their report also observed that lobbyists " used 'strong-armed' tactics...to try to link contributions to earmarks. The report also said there was a "wide-spread perception among corporations and lobbyists" that contributions were linked to access and earmarks."

March 2009 The process of earmarking has been substantially reformed since the beginning of the 110th United States Congress. Members of Congress must post all their requests on their websites and they must sign a certification letter (then put online) indicating that neither they nor their spouse has financial interest in the earmark request.

In March 2010, the House Appropriations Committee implemented rules to ban earmarks to for-profit corporations. According to the New York Times, approximately 1,000 such earmarks were authorized in the previous year, worth $1.7 billion.

November 2010 "In a swift victory for tea-party activists, the Senate's top Republican agreed Monday to a plan to ban GOP members from proposing earmarks for spending bills, suggesting that what was once a core part of legislating has now become politically unacceptable." "John Boehner declared that the Republicans had approved the proposal "to ban earmarks—the pet projects prized by lawmakers that had become synonymous with pork-barrel spending and corruption" two weeks after they had won the 2010 midterm elections with a House majority. Many members have instituted an applications process that their constituents must undergo for earmark requests.

Finally, earmarks constituted less than 1% of the 2010 federal budget, down from about 1.1% in 2006.

2011 Republican leaders of the House approved a ban on congressional earmarks in that Chamber in 2011 influenced by the Tea Party. Then President Obama promised during his State of the Union address in January 2011 to veto any bill that contained earmarks. Then in February 2011, Congress "imposed a temporary ban on earmarks, money for projects that individual lawmakers slip into major Congressional budget bills to cater to local demands."

November 2012 House Speaker John Boehner announced in November 2012 that the ban on earmarks in the House of Representatives would be implemented in the 113th Congress as well.

July 2015 "Earmark Elimination Act of 2015 Makes it out of order in the House of Representatives to consider a bill, joint resolution, or any other measure that includes a congressional earmark or limited tax or tariff benefit. Makes a conforming amendment to Rule XXI (Restrictions on Certain Bills) of the Rules of the House of Representatives."

"the term congressional earmark means a provision or report language included primarily at the request of a Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, or Senator providing, authorizing or recommending a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, credit authority, or other spending authority for a contract, loan, loan guarantee, grant, loan authority, or other expenditure with or to an entity, or targeted to a specific State, locality or congressional district, other than through a statutory or administrative formula-driven or competitive award process;"

— Earmark Elimination Act of 2015

2015 In 2015, for the purpose of clause 9(e) of rule XXI restricting certain bills in the Rules of the House of Representatives for the 114th Congress, Congressional earmarks were defined as,

"a provision or report language included primarily at the request of a Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, or Senator providing, authorizing or recommending a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, credit authority, or other spending authority for a contract, loan, loan guarantee, grant, loan authority, or other expenditure with or to an entity, or targeted to a specific State, locality or Congressional district, other than through a statutory or administrative formula-driven or competitive award process."

— Clerk of the House of Representatives January 15, 2015

The House Rules impose disclosure requirements for earmarks, while a standing rule of the Republican Conference has, since the 114th Congress, imposed an "earmark moratorium". Typically, a legislator seeks to insert earmarks that direct a specified amount of money to a particular organization or project in their home state or district.

2014 "Three years after earmarks were banned amid public outcry over perceived wasteful spending such as the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” opponents of the practice insist that earmarks could still make a comeback, despite unpopularity among voters."

2016 Paul Ryan announced that the Republican party is debating "the return of what supporters euphemistically call "congressionally directed spending.""

"Yet in the last six years, party leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers alike have discovered that earmarks were far more significant to the functioning of government than the sum of their cost to taxpayers would indicate. Their elimination furthered the devolution of power from Congress to the executive branch—a source of particular frustration for congressional Republicans who had long railed against the president’s use of executive actions on policies the legislature had declined to approve. And more consequentially, the ban contributed to gridlock in Washington by robbing party leaders of their ability to sweeten legislation for recalcitrant members. Where in the past they could offer earmarks to buy votes, now they were empty-handed. Stymied by constant revolts from Tea Party conservatives, even Boehner acknowledged he had been left with little leverage. With the grease gone, the train got stuck."

— The Atlantic November 2016

"Legislative earmarking was a lynchpin of Washington’s crony system—a favorite of the politically and financially well-connected, it wasted huge amounts of money."

— Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint's statement on the House's planned vote this afternoon to lift the current ban on earmarks. November 2016

In January 2017, a report by the CRS described how, prior to the earmarks ban in 2011, Members of Congress had used earmarks to ensure that local congressional representatives, not the Department of Transport and its Agencies Administration, set priority discretionary transportation spending.

"A ban on transportation earmarks principally affects discretionary programs overseen by DOT. It has little direct impact on the formula programs that make up most federal transportation funding. Earmarks serve as a way for Members of Congress to ensure that discretionary transportation funds are distributed according to their priorities, rather than those of the Administration. With earmarks prohibited, and if Congress does not act in other ways to set funding priorities within the discretionary programs, then the job of setting priorities is left to DOT, subject to the grant selection criteria set forth in law and regulation. One alternative to earmarks is more detailed legislative language to govern the allocation of funds."

— CRS January 2017

Earmarks by fiscal year

Before 1994 earmarks represented less than $7.8 billion a year.

1994 Republicans received their first majority in four decades in 1994. "According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, in 1994 earmarks represented $29 billion in 1994 to 14,211 worth $53 billion a decade later."

2005 "According to FreedomWorks, the GOP-led House and Senate in 2005 approved a total of 14,000 earmarks totaling $27 billion." The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service "counted 15,877 in the 13 appropriations bills for fiscal 2005, nearly four times the number in 1994, near the end of Democrats' long majority control of Congress."

February 3, 2006 "According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service the number of earmarks increased to 14,211 earmarks worth $53 billion."

April 6, 2006 "The U.S. government has earmarked $29 billion for pork-barrel projects this year, according to a report released on Wednesday by Citizens Against Government Waste. The House appropriations committee provided its own numbers, which claim $17 billion worth of earmarks for 2006."

"No one can agree on the precise definition. In general, the word "earmark" refers to any element of a spending bill that allocates money for a very specific thing—a given project, say, or location, or institution. For example, if Congress passed a budget that gave a certain amount of money to the National Park Service as a whole, no one would consider it an earmark. But if Congress added a line to the budget specifying that some of that money must go toward the preservation of a single building—definitely an earmark."

— Slate

In December 2007 President Bush year-end budget had almost 9,000 earmarks covering the country from east to west. Earmarks included "$500,000 for the Los Banos bypass for Merced County, Calif., to $300,000 for a child development center in Wewahitchka, Fla."

2009- September 2010 "[E]armarks made up $15.9 billion of a $3.5 trillion federal budget, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group."

[T]here were nearly 10,000 earmarks in the FY2010 spending bills.

Who benefits

"In the villages, towns and cities of the 19th Congressional District north of New York City, the signs of federal largess are all over: money for a library in South Salem, road improvements in Peekskill, renovations on an aging bridge in Dover and a communications network for the Police Department in Tuxedo."

— "District Liked Its Earmarks, Then Elected Someone Who Didn’t" The New York Times. 2011

John Hall, (Dem) who lost to Hayworth (Rep) in 2010 in the New York 19th Congressional District, "had secured nearly 70 earmarks totaling $51.9 million from 2007 to 2011 to the Congressional District, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. However, "aware of the controversy surrounding these spending items, put in place internal measures requiring any earmark his office sought to meet certain criteria, including that it create jobs locally or fulfill a public health and safety need in the district, according to a member of his former staff" and Hall's earmarked projects included "repairs to U.S. 6 in Cortlandt, teacher training in the town of Florida and flood mitigation at the parking lot of the Croton-Harmon train station." " money for a library in South Salem, road improvements in Peekskill, renovations on an aging bridge in Dover and a communications network for the Police Department in Tuxedo.

Daniel Inouye, of Hawaii, the Democratic chairman the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations and who was the 'No. 1 earmarks guy' "announced in 2011, that the Committee "would prohibit earmarks over the next two years."

Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who mastered the practice over 41 years, was reluctant in 2014 to endorse earmarks as they had become a practice "practice laden with political baggage."

John Murtha (D-Penn.) and the PMA Group and clients. “I can’t wait to put out a press release to tell people what I have done,” said

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and an earmarker of long standing. Mr. Durbin’s Web site trumpeted more than $448 million in targeted spending for Illinois, including $300,000 for exhibits to commemorate the Lincoln-Douglas debates — perhaps an appropriate expenditure given the divide over earmarks."

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee for commerce, justice and science programs used earmarks for home state, Alabama.

Opposition and support for earmarks

• Supports
  • Representative Tom Rooney of Florida 2016. "[E]armarks are essential for certain areas often neglected by congressional check-writers, like specific projects for the Army Corps of Engineers."

• • Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) "Congress under Article 1 is supposed to have line items in our appropriations where we say, ‘This is what the money goes for...I can’t think of a worse time in the history of the United States for the U.S. Congress to give up its authority to do specific legislating than under Barack Obama."

• • Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) "There always will be earmarks. It’s just that the administration runs the earmarks today."

In the past Gohmert and King criticized the way in which "The Appropriations committees in the House and Senate would often insert them into bills only in the final conference report that emerged from bicameral negotiations, and not when the bills were initially debated in each chamber. Because the conference reports are not amended before a vote, the public would only find out about the most questionable or downright indefensible expenditures—money for tattoo-removal programs or a teapot museum, for example—after they were signed into law, thereby making it easier to get those projects included in the first place."

• Harry Reid "I am one of the kings of earmarks....It’s the way we get things done around here... It’s the way it’s been done for centuries...I’ve never apologized to anybody. I go home and I boast about earmarks, and that’s what everyone should do." Iwas criticized for in enriching tactics. In 2005, Reid earmarked a spending bill to provide for building a bridge between Nevada and Arizona that would make land he owned more valuable. Reid called funding for construction of a bridge over the Colorado River, among other projects, "incredibly good news for Nevada" in a news release after passage of the 2006 transportation bill. He owned 160 acres (65 ha) of land several miles from the proposed bridge site in Arizona. The bridge could add value to his real estate investment.

"Some defenders of Congress seek to apply the term in reference to agency justifications for specific program-funding levels sent to the pertinent appropriations subcommittees in the weeks following the president’s public budget outline."

Earmarks or pork barrels

Politico (2014) used the term pork barrel and earmark in the same article.

The New York Times (2007) used the term pork barrel spending in reference to the 2005 omnibus spending bill that contained earmarked funds for the Gravina Island bridge.

Bridge to nowhere

In 2005, the United States Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that contained a $442 million earmark for constructing two Alaskan bridges. Pushed forward by Alaska Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, the Gravina Island Bridge was intended to provide a link between the Ketchikan airport on Gravina Island and the city of Ketchikan at a cost of $233 million in federal grant money. It received nationwide attention as a symbol of pork-barrel spending. Since Gravina Island only had a population of 50, the bridge became known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.

• In 2014, Alaska's longest bridge was completed across the Tanana River at a cost of $187 Million. Bridge consists of a 12-foot gravel path that connects a gravel spur road off the Richardson Highway near Salcha, Alaska, to the roadless Tanana Flats. The bridge will be almost exclusively for military use with limited access for hunting permit holders. Due to the current lack of infrastructure in the Tanana Flats and the ongoing uncertainty in Department of Defense spending, there may be limited use of the bridge From Wikipedia article Bridge to Nowhere. The Tanana River bridge replacement with a cost projection of $4,250,000 was listed as a congressional earmark in 2007

Citations

Reverse chronological order

2010s

• Russell Berman (November 25, 2016), "Republicans Get Ready to Welcome Back Earmarks: GOP lawmakers want to wrest back the power of the purse, but the pull of pork is colliding with Donald Trump's call to "drain the swamp"", The Atlantic, retrieved January 5, 2017

• "2016 Congressional Pig Book", Citizens Against Government Waste, 2016, retrieved January 5, 2016
  • In 1991 the Citizens Against Government Waste outlined seven criteria by which spending can be classified as "pork". The spending was "requested by only one chamber of Congress, Not specifically authorized, not competitively awarded, Not requested by the President, Greatly exceeds the President's budget request or the previous year's funding, Not the subject of Congressional hearings, Serves only a local or special interest."

• Fowler, Anthony; Hall, Andrew B. (December 2015). "Congressional seniority and pork: a pig fat myth?". European Journal of Political Economy. 40 (A). Elsevier: 42–56. doi:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.07.006. {{cite journal}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)

• • "Pork-barrel projects, which differ from earmarks, are added to the federal budget by members of the appropriation committees of United States Congress. This allows delivery of federal funds to the local district or state of the appropriation committee member, often accommodating major campaign contributors. To a certain extent, a member of Congress is judged by their ability to deliver funds to their constituents. The Chairman and the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations are in a position to deliver significant benefits to their states. Researchers Anthony Fowler and Andrew B. Hall claim that this still does not account for the high reelection rates of incumbent representatives in American legislatures. (Cited in Wikipedia article Pork barrel politics).

• The Murtha Method: Computer analysis shows 12 of 16 House defense subcommittee members in controversial circles of lobbyists, earmarks, and campaign cash, The Murtha Method, The Center for Public Integrity, September 9, 2009, retrieved January 5, 2017 May 19, 2014

• Burgess Everett (May 7, 2014), "Earmarks divide Republicans", Politico
  • In May 2014 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "offered a full-throated defense of earmarks."
  • Senate Republican Steering Committee held meeting on earmarks. "Three years after earmarks were banned amid public outcry over perceived wasteful spending such as the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” opponents of the practice insist that earmarks could still make a comeback, despite unpopularity among voters."

• Dermot Cole (August 5, 2014). "Alaska's longest bridge completed across Tanana River". Alaska Dispatch News. Retrieved August 5, 2014.

• Tim Ellis (November 8, 2013). "State's Longest Bridge Nears Completion, But Budget Cuts May Limit Army's Ability to Use It". KUAC. Retrieved August 5, 2014.

• Brown, Emma; Post, The Washington. "Daniel Inouye was war hero, Senate deal maker, 'No. 1 earmarks guy'". The Bangor Daily News. Retrieved 2016-04-11.

• "Daniel K. Inouye: Campaign Finance/Money - Other Data - Earmarks 2010 | OpenSecrets". www.opensecrets.org. Retrieved 2016-04-11.

• • "Former Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye described himself as the “the No. 1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress.” Inouye regularly passed earmarks for funding in the state of Hawaii including military and transportation spending (Cited in Wikipedia article Pork barrel politics

• Raymond Hernandez (February 4, 2011). "District Liked Its Earmarks, Then Elected Someone Who Didn't". The New York Times. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  • Republican leaders of the House approved an earmark ban in that Chamber in 2011. Then President Obama promised during his State of the Union address in January 2011 to veto any bill that contained earmarks. Then in February 2011, Congress "imposed a temporary ban on earmarks, money for projects that individual lawmakers slip into major Congressional budget bills to cater to local demands."

• • Among those who pushed for the ban were Tea Party loyalist Nan Hayworth, "who campaigned on a platform of belt-tightening, including an explicit pledge to abstain from earmarking." Ken Schmitt, the Republican supervisor of Carmel, wanted each project to be "considered on its own merits." Those opposed to the ban on earmarks included Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, who had, however, "long supported overhauling the earmark process and who was among the first lawmakers to place her own requests online."

• Erik J. Engstrom, Georg Vanberg (September 29, 2010). "Assessing the Allocation of Pork: Evidence From Congressional Earmarks." Vol 38, Issue 6, 2010. American Politics Research. See also {http://people.duke.edu/~gsv5/APR2010.pdf PDF]

"Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably better than equally situated members of the minority. Moreover, party leaders target earmarks to those holding pivotal agenda-setting positions and to electorally vulnerable members. These findings have direct implications for both the extensive political science literature on distributive politics and the practical politics of earmarking reform."

— Abstract 2010 Sage Publications

• Naftali Bendavid (November 16, 2010), "Tea Party Wins GOP Vow to Ban Earmarks", Wall Street Journal, Washington, DC, retrieved January 5, 2017

"In a swift victory for tea-party activists, the Senate's top Republican agreed Monday to a plan to ban GOP members from proposing earmarks for spending bills, suggesting that what was once a core part of legislating has now become politically unacceptable."

— "Tea Party Wins GOP Vow to Ban Earmarks" November 2010 Wall Street Journal

• Cox, G.W. (2010). "Swing voters, core voters, and distributive politics." In I. Shapiro, S. C. Stokes , E. J. Wood, & A. S. Kirshner (Eds.), Political representation (pp. 342-357). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

• • "In election campaigns, the term is used in derogatory fashion to attack opponents. However, scholars use it as a technical term regarding legislative control of local appropriations." Wikipedia article pork barrel politics
  • Cited in Engstrom and Vanberg (2010)

• "Guidance to Agencies on Definition of Earmarks", Office of Management and Budget Executive Office of the President of the United States, November 12, 2010, retrieved January 4, 2017
  • An earmark is a legislative (especially congressional) provision that directs approved funds to be spent on specific projects, or that directs specific exemptions from taxes or mandated fees. From Wikipedia article Earmark

2000s

• Shepsle, K.A., Van Houweling, R.P., Abrams, S.J., & Hanson, P.C. ( 2009). "The senate electoral cycle and bicameral appropriations politics." American Journal of Political Science, 53, 343-359. , Google Scholar

• Rimer, Sara (30 December 2009). "In Boston, Where Change Is in the Winter Air". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 November 2010.

• Crespin, M.H., & Finocchiaro, C.J. (2008). "Distributive and partisan politics in the U.S. senate: An exploration of earmarks." In N. W. Monroe, J. M. Roberts, & D. W. Rohde (Eds.), Why not parties? Party effects in the United States Senate (pp. 229-250). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. , Google Scholar

• Earmarks in the Federal Budget Process (PDF), Harvard Law School Federal Budget Policy Seminar, April 1, 2006, p. 45, retrieved January 5, 2017 {{citation}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)

• Stephen Barr (January 28, 2008), "Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia", Washington Post, retrieved January 5, 2017
  • Under President Bush, in 2008, the Office of Management and Budget used a wiki where federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks. They were able to complete it in ten weeks instead of the OMB's usual six months.

• Ron Paul(R-Texas) (April 2008), Formal statement on congressional earmarks Ron Paul(R-Texas)

• Bickers, Kenneth N.; Stein, Robert M. (2008). "The Congressional Pork Barrel in a Republican Era". The Journal of Politics. 62 (4): 1070–1086. doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00046. JSTOR 2647865.

• Higa, L. ( 2007). "House appropriators find different ways to spread earmarks around." CQ Today. Google Scholar

• "Alaska Highway: Milepost 1303.3 Bridge Replacement" (PDF), OMB, 2007

• Carl Hulse (December 20, 2007), "Congress Is Still Pursuing Earmarks", New York Times, retrieved January 5, 2017

"Earmarks served another purpose besides granting bragging rights back home. Lawmakers of both parties say the $555 billion spending measure, which provided $70 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the money for nearly every federal agency, could not have been approved without the incentives provided by little things like $7.5 million to stage the Special Olympics in Boise. “If they had taken the earmarks out, it would not have passed,” said Representative Mike Simpson, the Idaho Republican who won the Special Olympics money and ended up backing the bill that his own party leadership portrayed as excessive."

— "Congress Is Still Pursuing Earmarks" New York Times December 20, 2007

• "Citizens Against Government Waste". Cagw.org. 2006. Archived from the original on July 14, 2008.
  • Citizens Against Government Waste outlined seven criteria by which spending can be classified as "pork". The spending was "requested by only one chamber of Congress, Not specifically authorized, not competitively awarded, Not requested by the President, Greatly exceeds the President's budget request or the previous year's funding, Not the subject of Congressional hearings, Serves only a local or special interest." Wikipedia article pork barrel politics

• Jeffrey H. Birnbaum (February 3, 2006), "Earmark: It's $$$, Not Body Art", Washington Post, retrieved January 5, 2017

"[P]rojects, 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."

— Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Washington Post February 3, 2006

• "Earmarks in Appropriations Acts" (PDF), Congressional Research Service (CRS), January 26, 2006

• "The Budget System and Concepts" (PDF), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), January 2006

• Danielle Knight (May 21, 2006), "Loading the Pork Train: A case study of why earmarks may be getting out of hand", U.S. News & World Report

• Jackie Calmes (February 21, 2006), "In Search of Presidential Earmarks: Park, A Capitol Hill Staple, Also Is White House Custom, But Much Tougher To Track", Wall Street Journal, p. A6, retrieved January 5, 2017

• Associated Press staff (September 23, 2007). "Alaska Seeks Alternative to Bridge Plan". New York Times. Retrieved April 3, 2009.
  • In 2005, the United States Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that contained a $442 million earmark for constructing two Alaskan bridges. Pushed forward by Alaska Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, the Gravina Island Bridge was intended to provide a link between the Ketchikan airport on Gravina Island and the city of Ketchikan at a cost of $233 million in federal grant money. It received nationwide attention as a symbol of pork-barrel spending. Since Gravina Island only had a population of 50, the bridge became known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. From Wikipedia article Bridge to Nowhere.

• Daniel Engber (April 6, 2006), "What's an Earmark", SLATE, retrieved January 4, 2017

"No one can agree on the precise definition. In general, the word "earmark" refers to any element of a spending bill that allocates money for a very specific thing—a given project, say, or location, or institution. For example, if Congress passed a budget that gave a certain amount of money to the National Park Service as a whole, no one would consider it an earmark. But if Congress added a line to the budget specifying that some of that money must go toward the preservation of a single building—definitely an earmark."

— Slate

• Klein, Rick (August 6, 2006). "Big Dig failures threaten federal funding". The Boston Globe.
  • Big Dig in Boston, Massachusetts

• $315 million bridge to nowhere (PDF). Taxpayers for Common Sense. February 9, 2005.

"During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the Gravina Island Bridge (also known as the "Bridge to Nowhere") in Alaska was cited as an example of pork barrel spending. The bridge, pushed for by Republican Senator Ted Stevens, was projected to cost $398 million and would connect the island's 50 residents and the Ketchikan International Airport to Revillagigedo Island and Ketchikan." From Wikipedia article pork barrel politics.

• Cox, G.W., & McCubbins, M.D. (2005). Setting the agenda. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

• Volo, James M.; Volo, Dorothy Denneen (2004). The Antebellum Period. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 170. ISBN 0-313-32518-9.

"I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel."

— James Fenimore Cooper. 1845. The Antebellum Period

• Evans, D. ( 2004). Greasing the wheels: Using pork barrel projects to build majority coalitions in Congress. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

"Pork barrel projects would surely rank near the top of most observers’ lists of Congress’s most widely despised products. Yet political leaders in Congress and the president often trade pork for votes to pass legislation that serves broad national purposes, giving members of Congress pork barrel projects in return for their votes on general interest legislation. It is a practice that succeeds at a cost, but it is a cost that many political leaders are willing to pay in order to enact the broader public policies that they favor. There is an irony in this: Pork barrel benefits, the most reviled of Congress’s legislative products, are used by policy coalition leaders to produce the type of policy that is most admired: general interest legislation. This book makes the case that buying votes with pork is an important way in which Congress solves its well-known collective action problem."

— Abstract

• Herron, M.C., & Theodos, B.A. ( 2004). "Government redistribution in the shadow of legislative elections: A study of the Illinois member initiative grants program." Legislative Studies Quarterly, 29, 287-311. , Google Scholar

• Stephen Minicucci (2004). "Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860". Studies in American Political Development. 18 (2). Cambridge University Press: 160–185. doi:10.1017/S0898588X04000094.
  • The Bonus Bill of 1817 was a piece of legislation proposed by John C. Calhoun to earmark the revenue "bonus", as well as future dividends, from the recently established Second Bank of the United States for an internal improvements fund.

• Tomz, M., Wittenberg J., & King, G. ( 2003). Clarify: Software for interpreting and presenting statistical results. Version 2.1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Google Scholar

• Lee, F.E. ( 2003). "Geographic politics in the U.S. House of Representatives: Coalition building and the distribution of benefits." American Journal of Political Science, 47, 714-728. , Google Scholar

• Balla, S.J., Lawrence, E., Maltzman, F., & Sigelman, L. ( 2002). "Partisanship, blame avoidance, and the distribution of legislative pork." American Journal of Political Science, 46, 515-525. , Google Scholar

• Bickers, K.N., & Stein, R.M. ( 2000). "The congressional pork barrel in a republican era." Journal of Politics, 62, 1070-1086. , Google Scholar

• Schiller, W. ( 2000). Partners and rivals: Representation in U.S. senate delegations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. , Google Scholar

1990s

• Carsey, T.M., & Rundquist, B. ( 1999). "Party and committee in distributive politics: Evidence from defense spending." Journal of Politics, 61, 1156-1169. , Google Scholar

• Binder, S. ( 1997). Minority rights, majority rule: Partisanship and the development of Congress. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

• Levitt, S.D., & Snyder, J.M. ( 1995). "Political parties and the distribution of federal outlays." American Journal of Political Science, 39, 958-980. , Google Scholar

• Stein, R.M., & Bickers, K.N. ( 1995). Perpetuating the pork barrel: Policy subsystems and American democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

• Cox, G.W., & McCubbins, M.D. (1993). Legislative leviathan. Berkeley: University of California Press. , Google Scholar

Rohde, D.M. ( 1991). Parties and leaders in the post-reform house. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. , Google Scholar

1980s

• Baron, D., & Ferejohn, J. ( 1989). "Bargaining in legislatures." American Political Science Review, 83, 1181-1206. , Google Scholar

• King, G. ( 1989). Unifying political methodology: The likelihood theory of statistical inference. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. , Google Scholar

• Fiorina, M.P. ( 1981). Retrospective voting in American national elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. , Google Scholar

• Shepsle, Kenneth A.; Weingast, Barry R. (1981). "Political Preferences for the Pork Barrel: A Generalization". American Journal of Political Science. 25 (1): 96–111. doi:10.2307/2110914. JSTOR 2110914.

• • "In election campaigns, the term is used in derogatory fashion to attack opponents. However, scholars use it as a technical term regarding legislative control of local appropriations." Wikipedia article pork barrel politics

• • Cited in Engstrom and Vanberg (2010)

1970s

• Weingast, B. ( 1979). "A rational choice perspective on congressional norms." American Journal of Political Science, 23, 245-262. , Google Scholar

• Ferejohn, J. ( 1974). Pork barrel politics. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. , Google Scholar

• Mayhew, D. ( 1974). Congress: The electoral connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. , Google Scholar

1960s

• William H. Riker ( 1962). The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. , Google Scholar

• • Riker's is a book on positive political theory published in 1962. It uses game theory to formalize political theory by deducing the size principle. "On its postulates, politicians are proved to form winning, minimal-size coalitions. The work runs contrary to a previous theory that they try to maximize their respective votes. Riker supposes that attracting more votes requires resources and that politicians run to win. A rational politician tries to form a coalition that is as large as necessary to win but not larger." Wikipedia article

1950s

1910s

• Maxey, Chester Collins (1919). "National Municipal Review; "A Little History of Pork"". National Municipal League: 691, et seq. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

"[T]he term [pork barrel] was further popularized by a 1919 article by Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review, which reported on certain legislative acts known to members of Congress as "pork barrel bills". He claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving slaves a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout." From Wikipedia article on pork barrel politics.

• Hale, Edward Everett (1910). "The Children of the Public". The Man without a Country and Other Tales. Macmillan: 97–175. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  • In Wikipedia's pork barrel politics article.

1800s

• "The earliest examples of pork barrel politics in the United States was the Bonus Bill of 1817, which was introduced by Democrat John C. Calhoun to construct highways linking the Eastern and Southern United States to its Western frontier using the earnings bonus from the Second Bank of the United States. Calhoun argued for it using general welfare and post roads clauses of the United States Constitution. Although he approved of the economic development goal, President James Madison vetoed the bill as unconstitutional."
  • In Wikipedia's pork barrel politics article

• • Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 24 and Jan. 31, 1863.
• James Fenimore Cooper (1845). The Chainbearer.

"I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel."

— James Fenimore Cooper. 1845. The Chainbearer

Spain

"The Madrid-Seville high-speed line was a noted example of pork barrel politics in Spain. Pasqual Maragall revealed details of an unwritten agreement between him and Felipe Gonzalez, the prime minister at the time who was from Seville. The agreement was that Barcelona would receive the 1992 Summer Olympics and Seville would receive the high-speed railway line (which opened in 1992). This was in spite of position of the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed rail line as Spain's most profitable high-speed line. Barcelona received its AVE connection in 2008, though with many advantages that the line to Seville does not have, e.g. full-speed bypasses LAV Madrid - Sevilla and LAV Madrid - Zaragoza - Barcelona: - the decision to construct the line to Seville was only taken in 1986 and construction was rushed, so that the line would be ready for the Seville Expo '92."In Wikipedia's pork barrel politics article.

South Africa

South Africa.

See also

Portal|United States|Politics

• Pork barrel politics
• Advocacy group
• All politics is local
• Citizens Against Government Waste
• Client politics
• Corporate welfare
• Earmark (politics)
• Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
• Golden Fleece Award
• Government waste
• Lobbying
• Money loop
• People's Initiative Against Pork Barrel
• Porkbusters
• Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor
• Spoils system

Category:Political terminology Category:Public choice theory Category:English-language idioms Category:Ethically disputed political practices