The federal government set a new record for deficit spending in June, which makes it all the more frustrating that members of Congress carved out $15.9 billion this fiscal year in crony earmarks for their home states, according to a new report.
The 2020 Congressional Pig Book, published this week by Citizens Against Government Waste, finds that this fiscal year, Congress has carved out more money in corrupt earmarks than any year in the last decade. Earmarks are add-on legislative provisions that set aside a sum of money for specific projects, businesses, or recipients. As you might imagine, earmarks are incredibly prone to abuse. For example, former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham spent seven years in jail over an earmark bribery scandal.
Earmarks were supposed to have been suspended in 2011, when Congress promised a moratorium on the practice. Yeah, right. Citizens Against Government Waste has found many examples of spending bills packed with earmarks since the supposed moratorium, with earmarks totaling more than $30 billion just over the last two years. That might sound like an abstract sum, but, for reference, that’s equivalent to $250 out of the wallet of every taxpayer going to Congress’s pet projects. Earmarks have sliced off nearly $400 billion in taxpayer dollars since 1991.
So much for a moratorium, huh?
Here are just a few examples of this year’s crony earmarks unearthed by Citizens Against Government Waste:
- $65 million for the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund.
- $25.8 million for “wild horse and burro management.”
- $24 million for an aquatic plant control program.
- $15.3 million for “aquatic nuisance control.”
- $16.7 million for a Hawaii-based research center.
- $663,000 for a brown tree snake eradication program.
- $5 million for an arts grant program that last year doled out taxpayer money to wealthy Washington, D.C., elite art institutions such as the Kennedy Center.
- $28.3 million for international fisheries commissions.
- $19 million for a foundation that works to improve life in Asia.
These are obviously not projects serving the public’s most dire needs. However, they likely do please the individual constituents and donors of whichever lawmaker carved out the pork. Suffice it to say that this is not how taxpayer funds should be doled out.
Thankfully, some Republican lawmakers see the need for reform. “For far too long, members of both parties have been content with bankrupting future generations of Americans,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in response to the new report. “They’ve been content with wasting hardworking taxpayers money … content with soaring debt.”
“Earmarks are just one more bad idea that we need to discard before we finally face the truth and do our jobs,” Sen. Mike Lee of Utah concurred. North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd added, “Every taxpayer dollar is sacred, and we should really start treating it that way.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina has introduced the Earmark Elimination Act of 2020. The congressman commented on the Citizens Against Government Waste’s new report and said, “It’s time to say no, and it’s time to stand up.”
Time to stand up, indeed. If conservative legislators want to follow through on their promises to “Drain the swamp,” the elimination of crony, corrupt earmarks offers a great place to start.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a Washington Examiner contributor.
