[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 19185]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Flake) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FLAKE. Madam Speaker, I rise this morning just to shed a little 
light on the defense bill we may or may not be considering this year in 
the next week or so. There's a rumor going around that the defense bill 
might even be brought to the floor without going through a full 
Appropriations Committee markup.
  Now that is troubling in itself, but what is more troubling is that 
there are some 1,200 earmarks in this defense appropriation bill that 
very few Members of this body have actually even seen. That list has 
been passed around to Appropriations Committee members. A few members 
of the press have seen it. Our office managed to see a copy of the 
report. But virtually nobody else has seen it. That is 1,200 earmarks. 
For all the talk about transparency and a new process and where these 
earmarks will be vetted, we see very little of that here.
  I have been troubled for a long time at the number of earmarks that 
go through this body. A lot of people have been troubled. The whole 
country is troubled by the number of earmarks that go through this body 
without really even being seen and without anybody knowing what they 
are about.
  It's not just the money that is spent. We all know that earmarks 
leverage higher spending everywhere else. Because once you get an 
earmark in an appropriation bill, then you're really obligated, almost 
obligated, to vote for that entire bill, no matter how bloated that 
bill becomes. So you see higher spending everywhere else. Also, 
earmarks are put in unrelated bills in order to garner votes for other 
bills. But let me just talk about the defense bill here just a minute.
  Members of Congress, those who defend the secretive earmarks, often 
say that Members of Congress know their districts far better than these 
faceless bureaucrats in the administration, and that somehow, having 
Members of Congress sneak a secretive earmark into a conference report, 
is somehow better than having the administration decide where that 
money is spent.
  Now I am not here to defend bureaucrats or to defend the spending of 
money, but I can tell you it's not a good process when Members of 
Congress can put an item in a bill and have so little scrutiny, and 
what tends to happen is those who are up on the food chain in Congress, 
those on the Appropriations Committee, those who are in leadership 
positions, committee chairs, tend to get a disproportionate number of 
earmarks.
  So the argument that earmarks go to places because Members of 
Congress know their districts better than faceless bureaucrats really 
means that whoever has the power in this body gets the earmarks.
  Let me demonstrate a little here. Of the 1,200 earmarks tucked into 
the full committee report of this bill, it's worth about $2.8 billion. 
Of these earmarks, more than 400 go directly to Members who sit on the 
Appropriations Committee. An additional 111 are associated with 
appropriators. These are earmarks that were requested by that 
appropriator, as well as a few other Members.
  I would remind my colleagues that appropriators make up 15 percent of 
the Members in this body. Yet, in this bill, appropriators alone are 
taking 44 percent of the earmarks. Again, just 15 percent of the 
Members of the body, and 44 percent of the earmarks.
  When you translate that into actual dollar amounts, appropriators are 
taking $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars back to their district. This 
represents 48 percent of the total dollars earmarked in this massive 
appropriations bill.
  So what we have here, Madam Speaker, is a spoils system. It's not any 
high-minded, I know my district better than some faceless bureaucrat. 
It's, If I am an appropriator, or I am in a leadership position, I'm in 
a good position to get these earmarks.
  Let me just run through a couple of the earmarks in the bill. This is 
a defense bill. The purpose of this appropriation bill is to fund our 
troops and to fund our defense. Yet, we have, for example, something 
called the Presidio Heritage Center in California. It may be a worthy 
project. It may be something a local government or local people want to 
fund, but why in the world the Congress is funding it in the defense 
bill, I just don't know.
  But if this bill comes to the floor without being marked up in 
committee, nobody will be able to challenge it in committee. Nobody 
will be able to see it. If it comes to the floor under any other 
auspices than an open rule, then no Members of this body, the body as a 
whole, will be able to even question it.
  There's also something called a Cold Weather Layering System. That is 
usually a highfalutin word for a coat. Sometimes gloves are put in here 
under big names about hand-warming systems, or whatever else, when it 
shouldn't be funded in the defense bill at all.
  Another one, University Strategic Partnerships, Renewable Carbon Fuel 
from Algae. These may be good projects, but they shouldn't be in the 
defense bill.

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