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Lately, what has gotten Congress in trouble is the sheer number of earmarks and their role in recent ethics scrapes. Even Mr. Bush took note during his State of the Union address. "I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform, because the federal budget has too many special-interest projects," he said.
"It appeared to be a whack at the Congress, with no regard for the fact that he's got his own earmarks," says James Dyer, the former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, now a lobbyist. "They may be good stuff, but they're earmarks."
Mr. Dyer cites the Corps of Engineers items and "the whole faith-based initiative" that Mr. Bush has largely implemented by executive order to fund religious groups doing social work.
In the two weeks since the president sent Congress his fiscal 2007 budget, staffers at the House and Senate Appropriations committees have been combing the fine print for earmarks. So have some antiearmark watchdogs in and outside Congress. "There's nothing good about anybody's earmarks, not when we're running a deficit," says Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. The conservative Republican is part of a bipartisan Senate group led by Arizona Republican John McCain that proposes a "Pork-Barrel Reduction Act" to restrict Congress's earmarks.
But Sen. Coburn, in examining the Bush budget, ran into what has stymied watchdog groups and reporters for years: The information is hard to get. For all the talk of bringing transparency to Congress's work, its earmarks -- compared with the president's -- are relatively simple to find in spending bills and their companion committee reports.
The president's public budget does have line items widely considered earmarks. But the finer details go out -- to a limited readership -- days or weeks after the budget request. Each agency sends "justifications" for how it arrived at program-funding levels to the pertinent appropriations subcommittees. Veteran staffers say the collection of "J-Books" would form a pile roughly five feet high.
A spokesman at the White House Office of Management and Budget says "it's an agency's call" whether to release its justification book publicly. The appropriations subcommittees also vary in how much they share the volumes. Sen. Coburn, faced with going to many agencies or subcommittees, complained to the Bush budget office last week. By Thursday, his office had its own J-books, and, in an interview, he said OMB would post next year's details on the Internet. The OMB spokesman said it had agreed only to help the Coburn staff get copies of this year's justifications.
But even OMB doesn't keep a list of all earmarks. "I don't recall that we ever did a compilation," says Barry Anderson, a top OMB aide under Presidents Carter, Reagan, the first Bush and Clinton. "Of course, we had every reason not to do a compilation." As he recalls, presidents use earmarks much as members of Congress do: "To reward political supporters, campaign contributors and sometimes members of Congress" for votes on a presidential priority.
At the conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste, publisher of the annual "Pig Book" of congressional earmarks, President Tom Schatz says presidential earmarks are "difficult to track. Unlike with appropriations bills, where there's a document, you have no way to know whether" an executive earmark "comes from some agency's discretionary fund, and they decide to put it in some key district or state" for political gain.
An example popped up on the House Republicans' campaign committee blog. It copied a Louisville, Ky., news report crediting Republican Rep. Anne Northup, a target of Democrats in this year's midterm elections, for securing a $3.5 million research grant for a local surgical team. The funds came not from congressional earmarks but from Pentagon accounts, according to the report; administration officials said the surgeons' hand-transplant work could ultimately benefit wounded troops.
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