You would think members of Congress would learn from the onslaught of public outrage generated last year when the nation first heard about wasteful boondoggles like the “Bridges to Nowhere” earmark for Alaska. But just when they seemed to have taken a step forward last week, we find out they also took a giant leap backward.
First, the good news. The House of Representatives adopted on a voice vote an amendment offered by Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., that limits official attendance at the overseas conference junkets so popular with federal civil servants. The Garrett measure says no more than 50 employees of the U.S. Department of Interior or the Environmental Protection Agency can attend such conferences at one time. The Senate still must approve the measure and President Bush must sign it for it to become law.
Interior Department officials admitted in a letter last year to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that they don’t know how many employees actually attend such conferences, which are often conveniently held in attractive vacation spots around the world. Even so, the Interior officials estimated that their department spent $6.2 million on overseas conferences attended by 30 or more Interior staffers in 2004. At EPA, the estimate was $22.4 million to send staffers to 400 such conferences.
And then there is this: Most cheered earlier this month when the House approved a lobbying reform bill that included provisions requiring greater public disclosure of earmarks and names of the members seeking them. But then people started looking at the fine print and discovered lots of earmark loopholes. That means lots of representatives were playing a legislative game of three-card Monte.
On the one hand, many of these representatives stood before America and crowed about the importance of lobbying reforms. On the other, they were busily inserting exceptions like the one that exempts from disclosure the identity of the author of an earmark that directstax dollars to a federal agency. About half of the thousands of earmarks approved in recent years would thus be exempted from public knowledge!
There’s another huge loophole that can exempt from disclosure the authors of earmarks directing tax dollars to state and local governments. Example? Funding for Alaska’s infamous bridges goes to the state government, which means if the lobbying reform were in effect last year, we probably would never have heard about that boondoggle.
This sort of legislative sleight-of-hand was properly condemned by Republicans when they were the minority before 1994. Now it appears many of them have learned to love playing three-card Monte with our tax dollars.
