To citizens across the country, progress toward “draining the swamp” has been a hapless zigzag. Even after securing much-needed comprehensive tax reform at the end of last year, the administration and Congress put taxpayers on notice by restoring trillion dollar deficits with its recent spending bill. When asked to explain historic spending increases, elected officials too often tout benefits to “national security.” The Pentagon, America’s leaders argue, needs $700 billion-plus budgets to safeguard the country against threats posed by emerging powers such as Russia, China, and North Korea.
Even if the Department of Defense needs these astronomical sums to protect America in peacetime, the addition of tens of billions of dollars in earmarks is indefensible. In the recent omnibus bill signed into law by the president on March 23, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance found a whopping 642 earmarks, totaling $29.8 billion. These funds, which are devoted to a variety of wasteful and poorly targeted programs, show that lawmakers are unwilling to stand with taxpayers. Rather than all this sausage-making in smoke-filled rooms, taxpayers deserve a transparent process free of earmarking and duplicative programs.
The 2011 earmark ban hasn’t stopped lawmakers from increasing funding to dubious endeavors that do little to bolster America’s defenses or repair infrastructure. While earmarks are technically extinct, lawmakers have found ways around the 2011 ban and bake “inducements” into gargantuan defense and infrastructure bills. To go around existing rules, though, members of Congress have had to craft vaguer language that doesn’t quite guarantee district funding.
For example, in the House appropriations process for the Department of Defense, Rep. Betty McCollum , D-Minn., managed in the post-ban years to secure hundreds of millions of dollars for body armor production that would probably benefit 3M operations located in her district. (When the Army decided that the level of specific body armor manufactured by 3M was unjustifiably high, funding shifted to lighter armor production outside of Minnesota.)
The recent omnibus bill is full of similar examples. Topping the list is a whopping $1.3 billion increase in funding for the wasteful F-35 program. Projected per-plane costs have quadrupled over the past two decades, as planes continue to disappoint and underwhelm. Rather than following best practices and releasing fully functional prototypes, developers have released crude, underdeveloped models. Meanwhile, the fast-tracking of deployment means that key tests of effectiveness will not be able to be performed. Program proponents continue to tout the ability of the F-35 to counter future threats, even though basic features of legacy aircraft (ie. automatic munition impact time calculation) are not present.
And the F-35 is hardly the only earmark sneakily included in the omnibus. Funding for the Littoral Combat Ship will increase by around $500 million, despite even hawks like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., criticizing the program for waste and underperformance. At least, though, combat ships and F-35s are nominally related to the Pentagon’s mission of defending America. Defense Health Program line-items devote tens of millions of dollars to research of diseases barely related to the fog of war. While it’s important that ailments such as HIV/AIDS and various cancers are researched by scientists and public health experts, it’s unclear as to why the Pentagon ought to take the lead.
In all, 642 earmarks totaling $29.8 billion dollars were included by lawmakers eager to “grease the wheels” and pass the horrendously bloated omnibus bill. This amount, which is a 58 percent increase in the 406 projects requested in fiscal 2017 and a 105 percent increase in total dollars from fiscal 2017, is simply unacceptable.
For forging compromise in Washington, D.C., lawmakers needn’t resort to bilking taxpayers for unnecessary billions. Members of Congress can regain respectability in the public eye by further clamping down on earmarks, rather than pushing to reverse the ban altogether.
A stronger earmark ban, coupled with pressure on agencies to end destructive regulations and dubious programs, would send a strong message to taxpayers that lower rates are here to stay. Trillion dollar, earmark-ridden deficits will only erode the trust of the American people, while undermining the common defense.
Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
