House lawmakers have begun examining ways to help make the chamber run more efficiently, and the top recommendations call for raising the pay of lawmakers and allowing long-vilified earmarks to be included once again in spending bills.
In a modernization hearing held recently, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., called reviving earmarks, “putting members back in the driver’s seat on funding decisions.”
Pay raises, Hoyer said, are also badly needed to ensure Congress can attract a more diverse array of House candidates and not just those who are more affluent.
“The cost of rent, child care, and other necessities has risen substantially in Washington and across the country in recent years, but member and staff pay and benefits have not kept pace with the private sector,” Hoyer said.
House lawmakers earn an annual salary of $174,000, a figure that hasn’t budged in a decade.
Earmarks have been gone for nearly as long. They were banished in 2011 under Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who despised the practice. The Senate soon followed the House.
But lawmakers in both parties have, in recent years, been clamoring for more control over how federal dollars are directed to their own districts, particularly for infrastructure and waterway projects.
Republicans and Democrats say without earmarks, the White House is left in charge of deciding where to spend funding used by the Army Corps of Engineers or for highway and bridge projects needed in remote and rural areas.
“I thought we reneged, especially on our side of the aisle, when we transferred the power to the executive branch,” Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said at an earlier hearing on reviving earmarks.
Earmarks, are defined “as any congressionally directed spending, tax benefit, or tariff benefit that would benefit an entity or a specific state, locality, or congressional district,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
Some blame Young for ushering the end of earmarks in the first place.
As chairman of the powerful Transportation and Infrastructure Committee from 2001 until 2007, Young used his perch to allocate $400 million to a bridge project in a very remote part of Alaska.
The project became known as the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and helped cement the public’s view that earmarks are a form of secretive and wasteful spending.
But lawmakers argue earmarks can be revived with careful scrutiny and transparency, and would help districts by allowing lawmakers once again to direct spending toward individual projects to serve their constituents.
Pelosi has told reporters she backs a limited return of earmarks.
Her top appropriator, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who chairs the spending committee, said before earmarks can return, the House and Senate need to strike a bipartisan strategy on reviving them.
That can’t happen in time for the 2020 spending legislation, Lowey said.
“I am a strong proponent of congressionally-directed spending and I believe it is imperative that Congress exercise its constitutional responsibility in determining how and where taxpayer dollars that we appropriate are spent,” Lowey said in a recent letter to lawmakers.
Steve Ellis, who is vice president of the advocacy group Taxpayers for Common Sense, which chronicles pork-barrel spending, said Congress should come up with an entirely new system to allocate spending.
“Instead of perseverating about a return to earmarks, lawmakers should create transparent criteria and metrics for allocating funds through a merit, competition, or formula process,” Ellis said.
Earmarks may be off the table in the fiscal 2020 spending measure. It’s not too late for the House to pencil in a pay raise.
The House legislative branch spending panel has yet to author the fiscal 2020 spending measure.
Lawmaker have resisted voting themselves a pay raise since 2009, when they approved a $5,000 increase.
Washington, D.C., is one of the most expensive housing markets in America, and lawmakers complain they struggle to afford a second place to live while Congress is in session.
But their salaries are more than three times the nation’s average annual income of $50,000.
A spokesperson for House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee chairman Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, did not respond to a request for comment about the upcoming spending measure.
The recommendations to raise salaries and revive earmarks were pitched before a newly formed House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
The bipartisan group will present recommendations by the end of the year.
It’s tasked with a broad mission to modernize Congress and improve efficiency and will address the schedule, diversity, technology, staff recruitment, and many other issues.
