[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 116 (Tuesday, July 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H6476]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                EARMARKS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Flake) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FLAKE. I will speak for a minute and then refer to a few charts.
  Today, Mr. Speaker, I rise to draw attention to earmarks contained in 
the Homeland Security appropriations bill. We may not even have any 
appropriations bills on the floor this year. What may happen is that we 
will simply do a continuing resolution in September and then sometime 
in January do a big omnibus bill, and all of the earmarks, the 
thousands and thousands and thousands of earmarks that have been put 
into the bills through the appropriations process that have never been 
to the floor, will simply be approved with one vote. So it behooves us 
to do what we can to actually highlight what some of these earmarks 
are. Now, we know some of the earmarks that are in the Homeland 
Security bill, and we hope that it comes to the floor. It likely will 
not, so we'll talk about one of them here.
  Mr. Speaker, there is in the Homeland Security bill something called 
the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program. Now, this has not traditionally 
been earmarked in the Homeland Security bill. It only started last 
year. Last year and this year, we have earmarked some $75 million total 
for this account. Now, in this account, some $500,000 was earmarked for 
Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York for pre-disaster 
mitigation earmarks. This comes on the heels of the same counties 
getting about $1 million last year.
  Now, New York State has its share of disasters. I think there were 21 
Presidential disaster declarations over the past 10 years, but there 
were just as many in other States, other States that had to go through 
the regular process whereby grants were awarded on the basis of merit 
rather than on the basis of: Do we have an appropriator? Do we have a 
high-level Member of leadership who can get us an earmark for some of 
these programs?
  For example, in parts of Oklahoma, they had 20 disaster areas 
declared in the last 10 years. Yet Oklahoma hasn't received a dime in 
earmark funding in this bill. They must not have an appropriator here.
  We often endlessly hear that Members of Congress know their districts 
better than some faceless bureaucrat; that's why they've got to 
earmark, but let me ask: Does a member of the Appropriations Committee 
or a Member of leadership know his district better than a rank and file 
Member? Because the former are getting most of the earmarks at the 
expense of the latter.
  Let me refer to this chart. On this chart, in the last 2 years, for 
pre-disaster mitigation earmarks in the Homeland Security bill, rank 
and file Members have gotten about 37 percent of the earmarks. Here, 
appropriators and other highly ranked Members have gotten 63 percent. 
Of the $75 million total, 63 percent of the earmarks are received by 
just 27 percent of the Members in this body.
  Now, again, do those 27 percent know their districts better than 
others? I would suggest not. It's just that they're in a position to 
get these earmarks. So all of this hifalutin language about, you know, 
``we know our districts'' means just this: ``I'm in a position to get 
money for my district at the expense of others whether or not there's a 
Federal nexus, whether or not there's a real need.''
  Let me just point out that, in terms of Westchester and Rockland 
Counties, out of all of the thousands of counties in the country, only 
11 were wealthier than Westchester County in New York. Does Westchester 
County really need $500,000 in pre-disaster mitigation earmarks at the 
expense of some poor county somewhere else in the country? This 
earmarking, as we all know, has gotten completely, completely out of 
control.
  Let me just go to a couple of other charts. One of the other often 
used justifications for earmarks is that we as the legislative branch 
have the power of the purse. Article I gives us the power of the purse. 
That is certainly true. That is often taken as justification for doing 
the earmarking that we currently do, for the contemporary practice of 
earmarking. Well, at my request, I asked CRS to actually look and see 
what the Appropriations Committee has been doing over the past several 
years as the practice of earmarking has really grown.
  As you can see, from the 104th Congress to the 109th Congress, this 
is the line here. This is earmarking. We've gone from about 1,500 
earmarks up to nearly 10,000 just on this chart, but when you look at 
the number of witnesses called before the Appropriations Committee for 
a hearing to actually look at what we're spending, that line goes down. 
That line is in the blue.
  So what we're seeing is that, as earmarking has grown, real oversight 
has declined any way you look at it. If you want to look at numbers of 
witnesses, some people will say, well, you can't tell everything from 
that. I concede that.
  So let's look at the number of days of hearings. Here in the blue, 
from the 104th Congress to the 109th, we've had a decline in the number 
of days of hearings, yet a huge increase in earmarking.
  Keep in mind that another justification for earmarking is people will 
say, well, that only represents about 2 percent of the Federal budget. 
We ought to really worry about the rest of the budget, not just 
earmarking. Well, that's true. We should worry about the rest of the 
budget, but because of earmarking, we simply aren't.
  Now, I would suggest the reason that there are fewer days of hearings 
and that the reason the number of witnesses has declined and that also 
the number of survey and investigation staff reports has declined as 
earmarks have grown is we simply don't have the time or the resources 
or the inclination, frankly, on the Appropriations Committee to 
actually do real oversight.
  So, for getting just a couple percentage points of all of the Federal 
spending designated to earmarks, we really give up the power of the 
purse that we have. That's why we've seen other spending, all 
discretionary spending, grow by leaps and bounds as we've had 
earmarking go up; we simply don't look at the rest of the spending.
  We all know that the party that is now in the majority has made a lot 
of hay over the past couple of years that, in this Congress, there was 
a culture of corruption. If that were the case, certainly earmarks were 
the currency of corruption. That continues. It simply opens up too many 
opportunities when Members of Congress can without real oversight write 
checks to people from home, either to campaign contributors or to 
constituent groups or to anybody. Unless we really come on the floor 
and do real oversight, this is going to happen. When you have a process 
like it looks like we're going to have this year where we don't even 
have appropriations bills on the floor where we can challenge these 
earmarks, these earmarks go unchallenged.
  That, Mr. Speaker, I think, is certainly unacceptable. This body 
deserves better. We have a great and storied institution here, and we 
have a time-honored process of authorization, appropriation and 
oversight. We have skirted that for the past several years. Those in 
power now might point out, from the 104th Congress to the 109th, that 
was all under Republican rule. That is true. But the trend has not 
changed since we've had the new majority.

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