Cleveland Plain-Dealer
June 23, 2006
Editorial: Earmarks of scandal
A free-spending Congress keeps piling on pet projects, and it seems some members reap personal benefits, too
If members of Congress can slip unchallenged hundreds of millions of
dollars for pet projects into federal spending bills, funds "earmarked"
exclusively and without debate for spending within their districts,
what's to stop some of them from raking off a few millions of those
dollars to feather their own increasingly cushy nests?
Only their personal integrity. And that, according to some tedious
record checking being done by a couple of conservative watchdog groups
and now in the hands of the Justice Department, is an increasingly weak
restraint.
Earmarked spending is a sure-fire way to win the hearts of the folks at
home, while unconscionably jacking up the federal deficit. In the
annual defense-spending bill alone, the Congressional Research Service
reports, earmarks increased from 587 worth $4.2 billion in fiscal 1994,
to 2,506 worth $9 billion in fiscal 2005. Across the ballooning budget
they've grown from about 4,000 to about 15,000.
They represent bipartisan logrolling at its worst: If everybody does
it, everybody wins, the thinking seems to go. Of course, not everyone
does it. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake leads a handful of
conservatives who campaign against the practice -- and over whose
remonstrances the log has heavily rolled.
But the money has become so easily mischanneled that it now draws the
interest of the FBI. Investigators are probing how Rep. Alan Mollohan,
a West Virginia Democrat, increased his personal wealth eleven-fold
while steering more than $150 million to five nonprofit groups with
whose administrators he has business relationships.
And now, no less than the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, is
drawing attention for a $2 million land-sale profit he made while
earmarking $152 million to help build the Prairie Parkway in Illinois.
Hastert vigorously denies any wrongdoing, and Mollohan has filed
numerous revisions to his disclosure forms. But indications are that
the questionable use of earmarks extends far beyond these two. Tax
dollars too easily obtained and too freely spent flow where taxpayers
never intended them to go. It's time for the FBI to get out its mops
and sop up this mess.