Democrats want to revive earmarks will they further empower lobbyists? – Center for Responsive Politics

(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Democrats plan to revive congressional earmarks after a decade-long moratorium on the funding practice. In a call with House Democrats, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) promised that any move to bring the practice back to life will attract bipartisan support, Politico reported.

Earmarks, known officially as congressionally directed spending, are provisions written into bills that designate specific contractors for federally funded projects. Proponents argue that returning to the practice would make it easier for Democratic and Republican lawmakers to collaborate on legislation by cutting deals to entice lawmakers from across the aisle to support legislation that includes projects for their district.

In the federal budget for the 2011 fiscal year, Congress set aside $130 billion in earmarks. Small government groups and some conservatives point to these allocated funds as evidence of excessive spending by the federal government, a point underscored by several widely publicized scandals in the early 2000s that detailed how a handful of lawmakers traded earmarks for personal gain.

But Travis Johnston, a political scientist at University of Massachusetts Boston who has researched and written about the impact of earmarks on electoral politics, points out that congressionally directed funding represents only a small fraction of the total federal budget which was $2.6 trillion in 2011.

Both the media and the public really latched on to extremely salient cases, to big, big earmarks that were seen as a classic case of Congress patting itself on the back doing favors for one another, Johnston said. In reality, the price tag around these earmarks is kind of a drop in the federal budget. Its a rounding error.

Though earmarks constitute just a sliver of federal spending, K Street could see major gains from a revitalization of earmarks. The year after Republicans nixed congressional earmarks, total federal lobbying expenditures fell by $170 million, though other conditions including the economic recession and passage of the Affordable Care Act at the end of 2010 may have also played a part in the drop in lobbying spending. Lobbying spending rebounded under former President Donald Trump.

Our clients are excited about the prospect of a return to earmarks, and we think we can be helpful to them with our advocacy there, one senior lobbyist told Roll Call.

Before the earmark moratorium went into effect, defense contractors were among the biggest spenders on lobbying and received significant earmarked funding. Northrop Grumman spent $15.7 million to lobby the federal government in 2010 and took in $39.6 million from congressionally directed spending in the same year. Lockheed Martin spent $12.7 million in lobbying and received $17.9 million in earmarks.

If the reforms suggested by congressional Democrats are adopted, a revitalized earmark system may limit funding recipients to public or nonprofit groups, such as universities and state agencies. Such a stipulation would discourage private companies like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin from lobbying for earmarks.

However, many traditional earmark recipients would remain. In 2010, public universities were among the top earmark recipients, though they spent less on lobbying efforts than for-profit enterprises. The University of Mississippi took in $32.8 million and spent $120,000 on lobbying. The University of New Mexico was another winner, bringing home almost $19 million after spending $280,000 on lobbying.

Democrats are planning other reforms too. Party leadership is calling the provisions funding for community projects, and Hoyer assured lawmakers and reporters that this time around, earmarks will be better regulated to prevent abuse. Legislators will only be able to direct funding to entities in which they have no existing financial stake. The individual sponsor of each earmark will be publicly disclosed.

The modern debate around earmarks which appeared first in 1789 as a part of the first federal budget ever began with a series of scandals during former President George W. Bushs administration.

In 2005, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) famously secured $231 million for a bridge to nowhere, connecting a sparsely populated island with mainland Alaska. That same year, an investigation by the San Diego Union Tribune revealed that former Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) accepted millions of dollars in gifts from a defense contractor whose firm in turn benefitted from millions of dollars of earmarked federal funding. Cunningham spent seven years in federal prison on corruption charges before Trump pardoned him during his last week in the Oval Office.

Another lawmaker, former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), pled guilty to accepting bribes from lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for the inclusion of several millions of earmarked dollars for Abramoffs clients in 2006. Ney was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

In the wake of these scandals, a bipartisan group of senators joined with the Bush White House to champion the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which required lawmakers to disclose all earmarked sums and document the sponsor and recipient of each earmark.

After the implementation of the act, OpenSecrets and Taxpayers for Common Sense maintained a database of all earmarks, documenting how recipients of federal earmarks interacted with the federal government through lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. The full database can be found here.

Despite the 2007 reform, earmarks became a target for the Tea Party movement, which painted the practice as a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. In 2016, a poll by The Economist and YouGov found that 63 percent of Americans approved of the earmark moratorium. Fifty-nine percent of respondents also said that the practice of earmarks was generally unacceptable.

Earmarks strike a chord for people because they see it as this [politician] doing something for themselves, for their own community, at the expense of the country and the American taxpayer, Johnston said. I think that theres a generally conservative ethos that we are all socialized into adopting about limited government and you can play into those narratives pretty easily with earmarks. Its low-hanging fruit to identify these types of scandalous, corrupt practices.

Republican lawmakers spearheaded a 2011 moratorium on earmarks, and then-President Barack Obama pledged to veto any legislation that included earmarks.

Traditionally, public opinion on earmarks divided cleanly along partisan lines. A 2016 survey experiment designed by Johnston and co-authors found that 66 percent of Democrats, and only 45 percent of Republicans, said they would be more likely to support a politician who had secured funding for projects in their area. Fox News reported that the GOP is already planning to attack Democrats for supporting pork barrel politics ahead of the midterms elections, a threat that has made some Democrats in swing states wary.

But a lot has changed since 2016. Whether GOP attacks on earmarks and lawmakers who support them will have staying power will largely depend on the political context that develops over the next two years. Right now, most Americans are not concerned about profligate federal spending. Most voters support expensive federal investments even if they are paid for by adding to the federal deficit.

Were in a spend, spend, spend mood because of COVID-19, and so people are not paying attention to price tag, but if theres a whiplash effect, and we return to thinking about deficits, then I think that will be a different story, Johnston said. So I think it depends on how much it is messaged effectively, and how much the public latches on.

Johnston noted that the political discourse that surrounds earmarks and government spending more broadly has changed since the 2011 moratorium went into effect. In 2018, Trump surprised many by coming out in support of earmarks.

The enactment of the earmark ban, the rise of the Tea Party, all those things that did away with earmarks, thats really ancient history in the world of Trumpian politics and things like that, at least for the GOP, Johnston said.

The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress a bipartisan group of six Democrats and three Republicans recommended bringing earmarks back last September.The proposal has garnered support from some Republicans including Rep. Tom Reed (N.Y.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Punchbowl News reported Wednesday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has not publicly taken a stand on the issue, said he would follow Shelbys lead.

Other GOP members, however, are gearing up for an intra-party battle over earmarks. Reps. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) introduced a bill on Feb. 18 that would permanently eliminate earmarks. Budd and Norman are both members of the House Freedom Caucus, which tweeted Wednesday that it would oppose any effort to bring back earmarks.

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Democrats want to revive earmarks will they further empower lobbyists? - Center for Responsive Politics