Pork becomes 'earmarks' — 11,000 of them

By Andrew Taylor and Jim Kuhnhenn

updated 3:13 p.m. ET June 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - So much for trimming the pork.

The practice of decorating legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is still thriving on Capitol Hill — despite public outrage that helped flip control of Congress two years ago.

More than 11,000 of those "earmarks," worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year, keeping the issue at the center of Washington's culture of money, influence and politics. Now comes an election-year encore.

It's a pay-to-play sandbox where waste and abuse often obscure the good that earmarks can do.

An examination of many of those earmarks by The Associated Press and two dozen newspapers participating in a project sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors found much greater disclosure since 2006 but no end to what has become ingrained behavior in Congress. Assisting the project were two nonprofit and nonpartisan watchdog organizations — the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Millions of the dollars support lobbying firms that help companies, universities, local governments and others secure what critics like Republican presidential candidate John McCain call pork-barrel spending. The law forbids using federal grants to lobby, but lobbyists do charge clients fees that often equal 10 percent of the largesse.

Earmark winners and their lobbyists often reward their benefactors with campaign contributions. For many members of Congress, especially those on the Appropriations committees, such as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., campaign donations from earmark-seeking lobbyists and corporate executives are the core of their fundraising.

Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes find ways to skirt them.

"I know a bunch of members that if you go in to see them, somewhere in the conversation they somehow say, 'Well, we were looking through our list of campaign contributors and didn't happen to see you there,'" said Frank Cushing, a lobbyist with the National Group, which lobbies on appropriations bills. "Is there a quid pro quo? No, not directly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to figure it out."

Obama's aquarium earmark
The explicit campaign solicitations usually take place in the days following a meeting where an earmark is discussed.

"You can ask any lobbyist in town. You bring a new client in to see a member and everything is nice-nice and you have a good meeting and everybody's exchanging business cards," said another lobbyist who focuses on earmarks. "Within 48 hours, the clients and their lobbyist — me — will get a fundraising phone call." That lobbyist requested anonymity, saying there could be no conversation on the subject without it.

For all the outcry, most earmarks have much to commend them. Just because a lawmaker arranges a project for his home district doesn't mean it isn't worthy.

But many also go to causes or projects that, on the surface, don't appear all that necessary.

Anti-pork watchdogs, for example, point to the $1.8 million in five earmarks for Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, which ran $8 million in the black last year and has embarked on a four-year, $100 million fundraising campaign. With that kind of money, why should taxpayers fund a $400,000 program earmarked by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to help the aquarium conduct a program aimed at preventing juvenile delinquency, watchdog groups ask.

Despite such questions and public outrage over high-profile earmarking abuses, the system that now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff once called "the favor factory" is still running full tilt. Congress disclosed 11,234 earmarks totaling $14.8 billion in bills covering government spending this year, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based watchdog group. The White House puts the total at $18 billion, including the amounts that lawmakers added to what President Bush sought for specific projects.

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