And, as former Illinois Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen famously put it, pretty soon you’re looking at a whole bunch of tax dollars going down the drain, especially if earmarks are involved. Earmarks are anonymous spending orders inserted in legislation by members of Congress. The anonymity provides an unaccountable way for, among other more noble purposes, tax dollars to be channeled into the pockets of campaign contributors or favored associates of powerful congressmen.
That is why it is important that an unlikely coalition of media organizations, nonprofits and independent bloggers earlier this week joined in an effort to unmask the members of Congress behind more than 1,800 earmarks presently contained in the House version of the Labor-HHS appropriation bill pending before Congress.
Besides The Examiner, the unprecedented coalition includes the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste and Porkbusters.org. Each organization has posted the entire database on its Web site and invited visitors to help identify the sponsoring member of Congress for each earmark. The hoped-for result is what experts call a “smart mob” — a gathering of hundreds or thousands of geographically separated people who pool their individual knowledge, experience and insight via the Internet to solve a problem. Already more than a dozen Examiner readers have provided some very interesting information about earmarks in six states.
Collectively, the 1,800-plus Labor-HHS earmarks are worth a total of $502 million and average $268,000 each. If approved — as thousands of such anonymous earmarks in other appropriations bills already have been — tax dollars will be spent without anything remotely like competitive bidding or even minimal oversight and accountability. Here are two recent examples of how anonymous earmarks can be abused:
» Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., earmarked $200,000 for a Philadelphia foundation represented by the son of one of the senator’s top aides. Specter is chairman of the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. There are 112 Pennsylvania earmarks worth nearly $35 million in the Labor-HHS earmarks database posted by The Examiner earlier this week. Senate and House conferees will have to work out differences between the two chambers on the Labor-HHS appropriation, including earmarks in the final bill.
» Rep. Allen Mollohan, D-W.Va., jointly purchased a 300-acre farm on the Cheat River with the head of a defense contractor whose firm had received a $2.1 million contract via an earmark sponsored by the congressman. There are a dozen earmarks totaling $3.5 million for West Virginia in the Labor-HHS appropriations database.
Closer to home, the Labor-HHS earmarks database contains 50 Virginia earmarks worth $13.4 million, 23 worth in excess of $5 million for the District of Columbia and 28 worth nearly $8 million for Maryland. The Examiner is asking all local House members if they sponsored any of these earmarks. We’ll let you know what they tell us. Readers who ask area members can share what they are told by e-mailing: [email protected]. Be sure and put “Earmarks” in the subject line.
