Pet projects can come back to bite lawmakers

ANALYSIS

updated 6:42 p.m. ET Aug. 1, 2007

WASHINGTON - Given the recent headlines, lawmakers might seem eager to do away with earmarks, the narrowly drawn legislative provisions that pay for pet projects.

A former congressman and lobbyist are in prison because of earmark abuses, the Senate’s senior Republican is under federal investigation regarding earmarks, and President Bush has called for their end.

Yet they are more popular than ever. Their resilience and controversy are central to this week’s Senate debate over an ethics bill, which some call groundbreaking and others call weak.

Hammered by scandals and heavy criticism from editorial pages, Senate leaders are urging colleagues to follow the House’s lead in voting to require greater disclosure of earmarks.

But only a few lawmakers talk of eliminating them altogether, and the reason is simple: While many Americans criticize earmarks in general, they seem to love them when they result in a new bridge, senior center or employer in their home town.

Hundreds of House and Senate members routinely boast of targeting federal money to their constituents, especially when seeking re-election. The few who eschew earmarks and try to remove them from bills are routinely voted down by big margins.

Stevens faces probe
The continued embrace of earmarks comes amid the latest evidence that they can be politically treacherous: Ted Stevens of Alaska, the Senate’s longest-serving Republican, is facing two federal probes involving earmarks.

Agents are looking into whether he steered federal money to an Alaska wildlife research center that then bought land from a former Stevens aide. And they searched Stevens’ house in Alaska this week as part of a probe into his ties to an Alaska energy company that received tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts.

Stevens, the former longtime Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, has unapologetically become the face of targeted pork-barrel spending, ardently defending the widely ridiculed “bridge to nowhere” in a remote section of Alaska.

The bridge received more than $200 million in federal money. But Stevens has dealt with much smaller earmarks that may prompt colleagues to rethink the practice’s political cost-benefit ratio.

About $700,000 of nearly $4 million directed to the National Park Service was paid to companies associated with Trevor McCabe, a former legislative director for Stevens, according to officials familiar with the deals. That’s a pittance in federal spending terms, but illustrative of the often questionable relationships between earmarks and the general public’s best interests, say some lawmakers and outside groups.

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