Transparency in Government Takes a Hit

Transparency in Government Takes a Hit

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democrats promised that with their majority in the Senate and House, the new Congress would be the most open and honest in history.

But just one month into the era of the Democratic majority, critics charge, Congressional leadership has taken steps to hide earmarks from public scrutiny.

For 12 years during the Republican congressional majority, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) tracked "pork" or earmark spending. In February, this federal agency discontinued the practice.

The move was made so quietly that many members of Congress were reportedly taken unaware. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," whispered a private in-agency Feb. 22 directive from CRS director Daniel Mulhollan.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., sees the hand of the Democratic majority behind the halt in earmark tracking.

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"I'm convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS," he said.

"They claim it'll be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening."

In March, Sen. Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., submitted routine earmark inquiries to the CRS -- only to be told that the requests would not be honored. The pair immediately confronted Mulhollan about the denial of the longstanding service.

Later the CRS director, through a spokesperson, disclosed that he had developed the new policy after consulting with "internal CRS appropriations experts" and deciding the service was now redundant with what other agencies do.

Mulhollan said that because the Senate and the House appropriations committees and the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were now preparing their own lists of earmarks, CRS should no longer play a role in the process. "It is not appropriate for us to continue our research," Mulhollan wrote in a directive.

The director specifically denied that anyone in the Congressional leadership had pressured him to abridge the researches.

Mulhollan's redundancy argument, however, has a flaw.

The OMB launched a search engine on its Web site this year to track earmarks -- during fiscal 2005 -- and may expand the engine later. But the office has no plans to assume CRS' former role of earmarks scorekeeper for Congress, OMB spokesman Sean Kevelighan says.

"I haven't heard of any specific services that we're offering for members" of Congress, Kevelighan explains.

Butting heads on how to count earmarks is a relatively old story on Capitol Hill.

As the amount of earmarks has tripled over the last decade, there has been an ongoing dispute over exactly how to define an earmark. And that exercise of definition discretion can make a lot of difference in the bottom line.

For instance, in 2006, Concerned Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) identified $29 billion in earmarks, while Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee totaled up just $17 billion. But the CRS concluded that the amount that year had soared to no less than $67 billion.

Furthermore, CRS took a lot of flak for its finding that more than 95 percent of all earmarks in fiscal year 2006 bills weren't written into law and thus were not legally binding.

New Committee Standards

Even Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, claims to have been left out of the loop as the CRS stealthily got out of the earmarks-counting business. Through a spokesperson, Tom Gavin, it was announced that Byrd "in no way, shape or form tried to get them to change policy."

With that said, however, the man in Congress who has earned the nickname of "Pork King" was quick to make a move to stave off the inevitable heat.

On April 17, Byrd's committee announced earmark reform standards that it styled as "an unprecedented policy of transparency and accountability beginning with the Fiscal 2008 appropriations cycle."

"The changes that we are making in the appropriations process will help to restore confidence in the Congress," Byrd said. "We are ending ‘business as usual' in Washington, D.C. We will restore integrity to the process. We will increase accountability and openness, while we also will work to substantially reduce the number of earmarks in legislation."

However, Capitol Hill insiders perceive the Byrd move as a tactic to quell the unrelenting transparency demands coming from the likes of Coburn and DeMint.

Until S.1 -- the full package Ethics and Earmark Reform legislation -- is signed into law, the Senate Appropriations Committee said it will follow these standards:

All earmarks will be clearly identified in the committee bill and report. The identification will include the requesting Senator, the amount of the earmark, the recipient of the earmark, and the purpose of the earmark.

An earmark shall be defined as it is in the Senate-passed Ethics and Earmark Reform legislation: "An earmark is a legislative provision or report language included primarily at the request of a Senator, Member of the House, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner, that provides, authorizes, or recommends a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, credit authority, or other spending authority for a contract, loan, loan guarantee, grant, loan authority, or other expenditure with or to an entity, or targeted to a specific State, locality, or Congressional district, other than through a statutory or administrative formula-driven or competitive award process."

The committee bill and report will be published on the Internet, both through the committee site as well as on the Library of Congress' Web site.

Senators will be required to certify that neither they nor their spouses have a financial interest in any earmark. Senators will need to submit a letter to the Appropriations Committee certifying that they have no financial interest in a project. Those letters will be available for public inspection.

All well and good, say Hill-watchers, but that heady-sounding "ending business as usual" apparently includes nixing the healthy and useful business as usual of having the non-partisan CRS ferret out the earmarks tagging along with various legislation. The Appropriations Committee will become the final arbiter of what qualifies as an earmark.

In all likelihood, that means such embarrassments as the CRS' forthright reporting of the watershed $67 billion of pork in 2006 will not be repeated.

The fact is, the CRS had gotten too good at flushing out stealthy earmarks, which are often contained only in reports issued by House, Senate, and Judicial Appropriations Committees before formal debate begins in the House or the Senate -- rather than appearing in the actual legislation itself.

Despite the bells and whistles of the new Byrd earmark rules, Sen. DeMint says he wants the CRS to keep providing objective data as in the past.

For his part, Sen. Coburn said he will attach an amendment to every appropriations bill demanding the CRS prepare a full report on the earmarks in it. "Let senators vote for secrecy and prove they don't want a transparent process or let them deliver what they promised. The choice will be theirs and the American people will be watching."

Even before the introduction of the Byrd rule changes, the West Virginia Democrat had joined with incoming House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to pledge there would be no new earmarks until the next fiscal year began on Oct. 1.

But that vow did not stop Speaker Pelosi from tinkering with her requirement that U.S. troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 as a condition to an emergency $100 billion military appropriations bill.

When she couldn't tally enough votes, she added $24 billion in pork – much in the form of agricultural subsidies helpful to rural Democratic lawmakers.

Pelosi insisted the spending wasn't pork.

It's unknown whether the non-partisan CRS would have made the same determination.

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