It looks like earmarking continues to run rampant–even in defense bills. The Politico reports:
Just how open and honest the reformed process is can be seen in the new Department of Defense authorization bill that came out of the House Armed Services Committee in May. It did list 449 earmarks — in small, unreadable print–costing $7.6 billion, but the list was incomplete. An astute watchdog group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, found 53 additional, unlisted earmarks costing $744 million. When the Senate Armed Services Committee reported out its different version of the bill, S. 1547, it listed 309 earmarks costing $5.6 billion. When it comes up for debate in the Senate, 200 or more amendments will be introduced. About half of those amendments will be for home-state projects that for some reason the committee did not add during its initial review process. During the week or two the Senate will take to consider the bill, there will be debates, some of them interesting, on the great issues of the day: the war in Iraq, nuclear nonproliferation, the worn-out U.S. Army and more. Interspersed through those debates will be strange presentations by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (Mich.) and the ranking Republican, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). They will be reading off procedural motions, calling up amendments and passing them by “unanimous consent”; they will do this time after time, sometimes passing as many as 20 amendments in one sequence. The amendments will not be debated; they may not even be described. There’s a reason why these items will receive such little scrutiny: They are the pork amendments. The senators pressing them will have “cleared” them with Levin and McCain. Then the amendments will go through the arcane but well-oiled approval process, with utterly no debate — all in what calls itself the “world’s greatest deliberative body…”
Let me stipulate at the start that defense bills often contain meritorious earmarks. There are more than a few worthwhile defense programs that receive funding by specific order of Congress. That said, there’s something disconcerting about defense bill that contain hundreds–or even thousands–of earmarks. If there are that many important programs not receiving funding from the Defense Department, then Congress ought to be looking into procurement as a whole, not just cramming pet projects into appropriations bills.
