Davis-Bacon makes Planned Parenthood forgo grant

Published October 27, 2011 4:00am ET



There’s a sure-fire way to make a liberal’s head explode: Just tell him his eco-friendly windmills are killing endangered birds.

But here’s a story to make conservatives’ heads explode instead. The federal Davis-Bacon Act, which helps unions by forcing taxpayers to overpay for government construction projects, has proven so onerous that it has prompted Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon to turn down a $74,000 federal community block grant:

[A]ccepting the grant money would have required Planned Parenthood to pay prevailing wages to all construction workers under the federal Davis–Bacon Act, something Planned Parenthood didn’t know when it applied for the grant or when Eugene-based Chambers Construction, the agency’s contractor, put various pieces of the project out to bid to subcontractors.

Davis-Bacon is a pernicious piece of legislation that simply wastes taxpayers’ money. Its “prevailing wage” scale is designed solely to prop up union construction firms by preventing non-union firms from underbidding them. Yet it has just caused one of America’s most heavily subsidized and least worthy organizations to pass up taxpayers’ money as they construct an $8.5 million facility. How are conservatives supposed to feel about this?

For more on Davis-Bacon, try this.