Pet projects still abound in Congress
By ANDREW TAYLOR byline JIM KUHNHENN Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - So much for trimming the pork.

The practice of decorating legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is still thriving on Capitol Hill - despite public outrage that helped flip control of Congress two years ago.

More than 11,000 of those "earmarks," worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year, keeping the issue at the center of Washington's culture of money, influence and politics. Now comes an election-year encore.

It's a pay-to-play sandbox where waste and abuse often obscure the good that earmarks can do.

An examination of many of those earmarks by The Associated Press and two dozen newspapers participating in a project sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors found much greater disclosure since 2006 but no end to what has become ingrained behavior in Congress. Assisting the project were two nonprofit and nonpartisan watchdog organizations - the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Millions of the dollars support lobbying firms that help companies, universities, local governments and others secure what critics like Republican presidential candidate John Mc- Cain call pork-barrel spending. The law forbids using federal grants to lobby, but lobbyists do charge clients fees that often equal 10 percent of the largesse.

Earmark winners and their lobbyists often reward their benefactors with campaign contributions. For many members of Congress, especially those on the Appropriations committees, such as Rep. John Murtha, DPa., campaign donations from earmark-seeking lobbyists and corporate executives are the core of their fundraising.

Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes find ways to skirt them.

The explicit campaign solicitations usually take place in the days following a meeting where an earmark is discussed.

For all the outcry, most earmarks have much to commend them. Just because a lawmaker arranges a project for his home district doesn't mean it isn't worthy.

Anti-pork watchdogs, for example, point to the $1.8 million in five earmarks for Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, which ran $8 million in the black last year and has embarked on a four-year, $100 million fundraising campaign. With that kind of money, why should taxpayers fund a $400,000 program earmarked by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to help the aquarium conduct a program aimed at preventing juvenile delinquency, watchdog groups ask.

Despite such questions and public outrage over high-profile earmarking abuses, the system that now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff once called "the favor factory" is still running full tilt. Congress disclosed 11,234 earmarks totaling $14.8 billion in bills covering government spending this year, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based watchdog group. The White House puts the total at $18 billion, including the amounts that lawmakers added to what President Bush sought for specific projects.

A new earmarking cycle begins this month as the House and Senate Appropriations committees reveal spending bills for the 2009 budget year that starts Oct. 1. The House committee alone has 23,438 earmark requests before it, so many that its Web site for accepting requests froze up and the deadline for receiving them had to be extended. Lawmakers are unlikely to obtain many earmarks in time for Election Day, but they may tout them in hundreds of press releases anyway.

Defenders of earmarks note that the Founding Fathers explicitly gave Congress control over spending. And earmarks make up less than 2 percent of the annual spending bills passed each year.

Critics say too many earmarks go to a few powerful lawmakers such as Murtha, who by himself and in concert with others earmarked $176 million in 2008 federal spending.

Most of the 440 members of Congress who are not members of the House or Senate appropriations committees go along in order to get a sliver of the pie, even as many of them cry out for change.

Examples abound of lawmakers winning earmarks for specific companies or institutions, and then receiving campaign contributions from the recipients or their lobbyists.

TPI Composites, a defense contractor, received $2.4 million to develop a new all-composite military vehicle in the 2008 defense spending bill. The benefactor was Rep. David L. Hobson, an Ohio Republican who sits on the House defense appropriations subcommittee. The Columbus Dispatch reports that TPI executives have donated $10,000 to Hobson in recent years and that a TPI lobbyist has contributed $5,000 to his campaigns since 2003.

Defense industry executives and their lobbyists are Murtha's biggest campaign donors. DRS Technologies, which has given Murtha more than $29,000 this campaign cycle, has received $30 million in earmarks in fiscal 2008 from the defense subcommittee. Of those, Murtha accounted for $8 million himself, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. The company is based in New Jersey, but its biggest facility is in Murtha's southwestern Pennsylvania district. Within days of a fundraiser in his honor earlier this year, Murtha also received $8,500 from executives of Van Scoyoc Associates, a lobbying firm that represents DRS.

Earmarks come in countless varieties. Job training programs, grants to police departments, improvements to military bases, renovations to historical buildings and research grants for home-district colleges are just a few. They help pay for food banks and child care centers, sewer systems, roads and bridges, and equipment purchased by the Pentagon.

The most commonly accepted definition of an earmark is a specific project, contract or grant not requested by the president but inserted into one of the annual spending bills. Many of those bills often get consolidated into one.

Earmarks can do a lot of good. About 30,000 victims of leukemia and other blood diseases have received lifesaving bone marrow transplants through a donor registry program that Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., started through an earmark more than 20 years ago.

But Congress has been rocked in recent years by revelations of wasteful earmarks such as the $223 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that was supposed to connect an island with a population of just 50 or so to the mainland. It was never built.

In recent years, a half dozen lawmakers have come under Justice Department scrutiny over earmarks. Former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., sits in a federal prison for pressuring Pentagon officials to award contracts to people who gave him more than $2.4 million in bribes.

Congress has asked the Justice Department to investigate Alaska GOP Rep. Don Young's $10 million earmark for a Florida highway interchange sought by a developer who gave him campaign contributions. Former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., is embroiled in an investigation of earmarks for clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former GOP congressman, who also have been generous campaign donors to Lewis.

Once limited to the most senior and powerful lawmakers, or those on the Appropriations and Transportation committees, earmarking pet projects and grants mushroomed after Republicans took over Congress in 1995.

The new speaker then, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, saw earmarks as a way to help endangered Republicans keep their seats and to reward lawmakers loyal to GOP leaders.