If it tastes like pork– Randy Kuhl’s “smell test”
In today’s D&C, Jill Terreri has a terrific article on federal earmarks. The article is packed with information — here’s a quick summary of the most interesting facts:
- * About $36 million in earmarks has come or will come to projects in Monroe County in fiscal year 2008.
- * Private companies were the primary recipients of the money, getting about 45 percent of it.
- * Nationwide, there are about $15 billion in earmarks out of a federal budget of $3 trillion.
I am not a huge fan of the earmark system, for reasons I’ll go into later, but the last line provides some key perspective. Less than one half of one percent of the federal budget is spent on earmarks. The country will spend about ten times as much on the war this year than it spends on earmarks.
That said, $15 billion is still a lot of money. And the problem with earmarks is that they’re essentially at the Congressman’s discretion. There is not much of an external review process. Many reformers believe that earmarks should be replaced by a grant process where requests go through an external review board, so that expenditures are rigorously justified and weighed against other proposed expenditures, the way they would be at a company, or a school, or…pretty much anywhere else you can think of.
Now, let’s get to Randy Kuhl’s quotes on it, which gets to what’s wrong with the whole system:
“I have my own smell test, if you will.”
[...]
Kuhl said he relies on lobbyists to provide information but isn’t influenced by them when making earmark decisions.
So Kuhl takes in a lot of information from lobbyists, applies his own smell test, and then awards money based on that. Great system, huh?
I’m not trying to single Randy Kuhl out here — I’m sure that many of the others use the same unscientific, lobbyist-driven method.
The real problem with earmarks, beyond the screwiness of the system by which are administered, is that they’re part of a larger incumbency protection racket (a racket that also includes franking privileges and our current campaign finance system). No one wants to vote against the nice man who brought home money for the firehouse, no matter that the cost of the war the nice man supports dwarfs all the money spent on all earmarks in the past year.
Good post, and it was a good article in the D&C.
On the “review board” concept — that would certainly be better than the current situation, but how about just abolishing earmarks. If there isn’t enough money being spent on fire stations, for example, Congress can establish a Homeland Security grant program with published criteria, oversight and audit. The whole earmark program short-circuits the existing governmental mechanism — adding to it just duplicates the work of existing federal agencies.
I do advocate abolishing earmarks per se and replacing them with grants. There may be things that are now getting funded with earmarks that really should be funded. But the mechanism by which they are funded should be radically overhauled.
@#$%^&*()#$^%&*()_#@$%^&*()_@#$%^&!!!!
Now that I have your attention, please be aware that no matter what the rochester delegation brings in it is always a pittance based on population.
We have 1 million people. We represent about 1/3 of 1% of the US population (300 million). for 15 Billion dollars, we should be getting 50 Million. No matter how many newsletters, grand openings, ground breaking ceremonies and free mailers to let you know that, our delegation short changes us EVERY year and the D&C never reports this EVERY year. Its as if we should be grateful for our porridge. Or for the right of Kuhl to play Santa Claus. Hey D&C, how about a headline that says “Congressional Delegation Fails Again. Area loses its fair share by 28%.”? I am all for changing the system for the reason my Fed tax dollars won’t be spent on southern home cooking. However, under the current system, the congressional representatives get credit when little credit is due.
Thanks for that info! One thing that’s not clear is what they mean by “Rochester area” in the article. The census bureau lists Monroe County as having 750K people, which is more like 1/400 of the country, so the figure cited for Monroe County of $36 is almost exactly what it should be (one four hundredth of $15 billion is $37.5 million).
In any case, though, thanks for breaking it down this way. I love this kind of analysis — it’s the smartest way to look at things.
I’m going to poke around a little more and see what I can find about this historically. It’s been my impression that Monroe County is weakened Congressionally by having been divided up the way it is.
2005 data shows NYS as a whole received $29 per person in earmark dollars. Alaska received more than $1,000/person. This visualization is striking:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SMpBZGsOtha68KE2qsZhG2-
It’s generally proportional to the number of representatives per person, if you count representatives in the right way. So you think of NYS and Alaska as getting the same amount from the Senate and NYS as getting about 29 times as much from the House. Thinking of it that way, NYS gets about twice as much money over all, which amounts to about 1/15 as much per person, since the NYS population is about 30 times as much as Alaska.
Of course, it’s even worse in this case — Alaska gets nearly 40 times as much per person. But you can predict the inequities relatively well using the model I described above.
The other thing that’s clear is that Randy is in the pocket of Maggie Brooks and Steve Minarik. It’s noted that he bypasses funding to his own home county of Steuben and delivers to Monroe and his “honorary campaign chair” Maggie & Co.
If I lived in Steuben County…this would be an eye-opener to me.
[...] has spoken before of having a “smell test”. I think we all know that his claims here smell [...]
[...] Twenty-seven million divided by four is about seven million a year. That’s for a town of about seven thousand at the time. By contrast, Monroe County with over hundred times the population got about 38 million in earmarks, according to the D&C. [...]