Conservatives theoretically are right to lament that Democrats plan to renew the practice of “earmarking” specific, local projects in spending bills. In practice, though, the end of the “ban” on earmarks won’t make much difference. For that, conservatives have themselves to blame.
For years, conservatives pushed for an earmark ban, arguing that allowing congressmen to direct funds to specific pork projects encouraged extra spending and created incentives for graft. The latter argument remains legitimate, although corrupt politicians don’t need earmarks if they want to engage in grift and graft. The former argument, though, the one about saving money, proved mistaken.
After various earlier attempts to ban the local pork practice, some of which did operate as de facto bans temporarily, both chambers of Congress formally prohibited earmarks in 2011. Fiscally conservative Republicans had taken majorities in both chambers by then, so the earmark ban was part-and-parcel of their broader attempts to restrain President Barack Obama’s big-government proclivities.
And yes, whether due to the restriction on specific pork or just due to Tea Party-inspired fiscal discipline, the levels of domestic discretionary spending essentially flat-lined for a few years, rising from $528 billion in 2012 (the first fiscal year for which the ban applied) to just $531 billion in 2015. In sum, such appropriations rose by less than inflation.
This was well and good. Still, when a fiscally profligate Donald Trump took office, the earmark ban did nothing whatsoever to restrain spending, even with supposedly conservative Republicans still controlling both House and Senate in 2017-18. The first Trump-era domestic appropriations (for fiscal 2018) skyrocketed from $586 billion to $722 billion in one year, without a single crisis to justify it. (See table 5.6 here.) Even without earmarks, Congress spends however much it wants to spend.
The earmark ban proved immaterial because of the way it was designed. While lawmakers couldn’t specify a local project by name, they could still work to ensure that enough money was in each appropriations bill to cover local projects and then define the purposes of the spending in such a way as to make localities eligible for projects or grants that — gee, imagine the coincidence! — just so happened to match particular localities’ needs. While such backdoor pork practices weren’t guaranteed to result in the desired funds being directed to the desired community, they still were likely enough to produce success that incentives for big spending remained.
Here’s the better plan: Rather than banning earmarks, congressional rules should make any earmark in any appropriations bill subject to an up-or-down vote challenge on the House floor, with just, say, three minutes of debate on each side. And here’s the key: Any successful earmark challenge should automatically reduce the total budget authority for the agency in question by exactly the amount of the earmark.
What most people don’t understand is that under long-standing rules, any specific item removed from a spending bill merely removes the specificity of that spending, while leaving the total top-line appropriation in the whole bill unchanged. Under my proposal, if $20 million for a widget factory in Podunk is removed by vote, then the total appropriation for the federal agency likewise would be reduced by $20 million.
Now, that would provide an incentive for lawmakers to be fiscally conservative. Congressmen from conservative districts could go home and boast about how much pork they voted to deny all those big spenders from New York and California, thus saving the money of taxpayers in their own districts.
The “earmark ban” was well intentioned, but it proved a distraction. Real spending reform needs teeth, not a catchy title.
Note: Quin Hillyer spent two years as press secretary at the House Appropriations Committee.
