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by Dave Obey
Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.) is the senior Democrat on the Committee on Appropriations.
October 24, 2003
The Honorable Ralph Regula
Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor-Health and Human Services-Education
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Ralph,
As we have discussed on repeated occasions, the decisions made last spring in the Budget Resolution and in the allocations adopted by the full Appropriations Committee forced the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee to cut billions of dollars from the promises made in both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The appropriation bill that you took to the floor in July provided $8 billion less in funding for the No Child Left Behind Act than the amounts authorized for that program only two years ago, and $11.2 billion less than the amount needed to cover 40 percent of the cost of educating all disabled students, a goal widely espoused by Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Incredibly, the bill was $1.2 billion below the amount promised for disabled education in the Budget Resolution pushed through the House by your leadership only three weeks before this bill was reported from subcommittee. The appropriation bill that you took to the floor also forced an actual reduction in research to conquer a number of dreaded diseases and it provides fewer funds for the "Meals on Wheels" program than are needed to maintain the current number of meals being served.
It was for these reasons that Democrats in the House regretfully found it necessary to oppose your appropriation measure. As we stated at the time, you produced the best product you could given the limitations imposed on you but we did not agree with those limitations. We specifically did not agree that tax cuts targeted to a small and very well-off segment of the population were more important than meeting the pressing budget shortfalls in our schools, maintaining our level of effort in fighting dreaded diseases or ensuring that our infirm elderly get enough to eat. I think you know our reasons and I think you know that they were heartfelt matters of conscience that gave us no alternative but to vote against the funding levels that you were forced to put forward.
That is why I am so deeply disturbed by the proposal attributed to you in various press accounts. They indicate that you plan to add $1 billion in various types of earmarks to this appropriation bill, with none of those earmarked funds going to the 205 Congressional Districts represented by Democrats. This, according to those accounts, is in retribution for the fact that all Democrats voted against your bill when it was considered on the House Floor.
As you know, I have repeatedly opposed the earmarking of funds in the Labor-HHS-Education bill. In the 22 years that I served on this subcommittee prior to the Republican takeover of the House, there was rarely an earmark of any kind in this bill, and on the rare occasions when earmarks did appear, they were inserted by the Senate over the strong opposition of House Democrats. During that period, I never earmarked one dime of Labor-HHS-Education funding for my district. Significant earmarks did not begin to appear in the Labor-HHS-Bill until after 1995. In the fiscal year 1996 appropriation, after the Republican takeover, $33 million was earmarked. Two years later, earmarks jumped to $97 million and the following year (fiscal year 1999) earmarked Labor-HHS funds jumped to $300 million. In fiscal year 2000 they jumped to $453 million and the following year to $911 million. In fiscal year 2002 they hit $1 billion.
As you know I repeatedly urged the conferees during those years to reduce or eliminate these earmarks for the simple reason that we were leaving too many pressing needs unmet in the bill to be able to fund a panoply of individual member concerns--a significant portion of which clearly failed on any reasonable scale of priorities to rank with teaching children to read or fighting cancer.
The argument against earmarks was made on an almost daily basis by members of your own party throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. While there was virtually no "pork" in the Labor-HHS-Education bill and far less in nearly all of the other appropriation bills than is true now, the alleged "excess of pork" in appropriations measures was exhibit A in the Republican mantra about "forty years of mismanagement." As Ernest Istook, a member of our subcommittee, was fond of saying during that period, "a pig is a pig, even if he lives at home."
The argument against diverting funds to lower priority purposes was a strong one even when we were in a
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