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WASHINGTON -- Presidents like pork, too.
With Congress on the defensive about members' appetites for earmarks -- those funds in spending bills dedicated to projects special to constituents and contributors -- Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are taking a look at President Bush's plate of spending favorites. And his wife's as well.
There's the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program, which this year has $24 million for grants to train people for the first lady's former profession. For the fiscal year that starts in October, Mr. Bush seeks $10 million for Preserve America grants for communities' historic preservation efforts and $50 million for the Helping America's Youth Initiative -- also among programs championed by Mrs. Bush.
While the Education Department's budget would be cut, Mr. Bush proposes a 16% increase to $204 million for teaching sexual abstinence in high schools, a popular cause for social conservatives. The president's $5.3 billion request for the Army Corps of Engineers includes scores of proposed water and wetlands projects.
"The administration always wants specific things," says Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who, as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee for commerce, justice and science programs, is practiced at earmarks for home state Alabama. "I guess you could call it whatever you want to."
Just what the definition of "it" is varies. "There is not a single definition of the term earmark accepted by all practitioners and observers of the appropriations process," the Congressional Research Service said in a January report. Its analysts nonetheless counted 15,877 in the 13 appropriations bills for fiscal 2005, nearly four times the number in 1994, near the end of Democrats' long majority control of Congress.
The president's earmarks are harder -- if not impossible -- to tally. Many appear only in closely held supplements separate from the public budget books. Also, as head of the executive branch, the president often doesn't need earmarks: Once federal agencies get funding from Congress, his appointees are fairly free to steer sums to places, programs and vendors as the administration decides -- from Pentagon contracts to this year's $100 million Teacher Incentive Fund, another priority of Mrs. Bush.
That attracts lobbyists for special interests, just as at the Capitol. "They can go to agencies as easily as to Congress," says Keith Ashdown, vice president for the watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The administration's license to spend is one reason why Congress earmarks funds -- to assert its "power of the purse" and limit the president's. "I thought it was our constitutional duty as a Congress to appropriate how money is spent," says Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican on the House Appropriations panel.
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