Real Reform or Change for Chumps: Earmark Policy Developments, 2006–2010

• Author: Richard Doyle
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02304.x
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Date: 01 January 2011

Public

Documents:

Recent Trends in

Federal Earmarks

Richard Doyle is an associate professor

of public budgeting in the Graduate School

of Business and Public Policy at the Naval

Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

E-mail: rdoyle@nps.edu

34 Public Administration Review • January | February 2011

Nancy Roberts, Editor

Richard Doyle

Naval Postgraduate School

In response to widespread perceptions of problems

associated with congressional earmarks, reform e orts

began in late 2006 and continued through 2010.

 is essay summarizes those problems, explains the

distribution of earmarks within Congress, and documents

their rise and relative fall between 1991 and 2010 using

government and public interest group databases.  e

author explains and critiques earmark reform policies,

including congressional rules, initiatives taken by the

congressional appropriations committees, and reforms

pursued by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama

administrations. Congressional rules and committee-

initiated reforms have been most e ective, resulting in

signi cant improvements in earmark transparency and

accountability.  e number and dollar value of earmarks

 rst dropped noticeably in  scal year 2007 after an

earmark moratorium, and then stabilized as reforms

were implemented. It is premature to conclude that these

levels will continue or that reforms will alter the policy

content of earmarks or their distribution among members

of Congress.

Earmarking, Savage argued, “is an important

political and budgetary issue” (2009, 448). Its

signi cance, however, lies in the perspective

taken on it. For example, in a comprehensive critique

of the contemporary budget process, Rubin noted that

earmarks have grown “beyond the ability of legisla-

tors to evaluate and prioritize,” and that some of them

“have been revealed as rewards for  nancial donors,

contributing to the impression that government is

corrupt” (2007, 608).  ey are no longer, she argued,

part of “the hurly-burly of competitive budgeting”

(614). Brookings scholars saw the same problem in

that same year, observing that earmarking had gotten

“out of hand and was used and abused in a fashion we

have not seen before in recent years” (Mann, Binder,

and Ornstein 2007). CQ Weekly observed that “ear-

marks . . . have been cited as a symbol of everything

that’s wrong with Congress” (Benkelman 2007).

As earmarks became associated with a series of high-

pro le scandals and investigations involving members

of Congress, lobbyists, and others, public interest

organizations such as Citizens Against Government

Waste (CAGW) and Taxpayers for Common Sense

(TCS) focused extraordinarily critical attention on

them.  e mainstream media were similarly critical.

In a single week in 2008, three television network

news broadcasts mentioned earmarks 91 times, nearly

as often as they made reference to Afghanistan (Alter-

man and Zornick 2008).

Within Congress, a handful of senators and congress-

men consistently attacked earmarks as spending bills

moved through Congress. Congressman Je Flake

referred to earmarks as “the currency of corruption

in Congress” (2006), “no-bid contracts” (2009),

and a “gateway drug to out-of-control spending”

(USA Today 2009). Senator John McCain regularly

attempted to strike earmarks from appropriations leg-

islation. Earmarking became something of a campaign

issue during the congressional elections in 2006 and

2008, and Senator McCain employed his opposition

to earmarks in 2009 “to rally conservatives reluctant

to support his presidential campaign” (Kane 2009).

 e sound and fury associated with earmarks signify

potential problems of several types, outlined here,

none of them a threat to constitutional or  scal order.

 ose di culties have become less acute as a con-

sequence of reforms put in place between 2006 and

2010.

The Earmark Critique

Several themes dominate the earmark critique. First is

the notion that earmarks serve only the members of

Congress who procure them rather than some larger

public purpose.  e argument is that some members

of Congress use earmarks to steer funds to companies

that, in return, provide or arrange for the provision

of campaign contributions.  is “busy intersection

between political fund-raising and taxpayer spending”

has been at the heart of a series of events associated

with a lobbying  rm called the PMA Group (Kirk-

patrick 2006).  e late congressman John Murtha,

Real Reform or Change for Chumps: Earmark Policy

Developments, 2006–2010