Earmarks Continue In A Different Form

On of the big campaign promises of the Republicans in the last election was to do away with the pork barrel spending in Congress -- and they said they would do this by eliminating the congressional practice of "earmarking" (congressmen designating millions of dollars of spending for their own districts and slipping it into bills to be passed).   In fact, the Republican caucus made a big show of voting to eliminate earmarks and dared Democrats to do the same.

Mission accomplished.   Right?   Well, no.   It seems that these same congressmen/women that made such a production of doing away with earmarks weren't really serious about it.   The ban on earmarks was just to make themselves look good to the general public.   The wasteful spending goes on, it has just taken a slightly altered form.

According to the New York Times, earmarks have been replaced by lettermarking, phonemarking or soft-earmarking.   Lettermarking is when a congressperson writes a government agency a letter asking for certain funds for his/her district or state.   Phonemarking is when they do the same thing with a phone call to the federal agency.   And a soft earmark is when a congressperson "suggests" an agency direct certain funds to his/her district or state rather than inserting it into law.

The congresspeople doing this claim it is not the same as earmarking because they are only asking and the agency asked has the final discretion on where to spend the funds.   What a gigantic load of horse manure!   What agency head in his right mind is going to ignore a request from a congressperson -- the very people who decide how much money his agency will get the following year?   A failure to fund very many of these requests could find the agency unfunded in the next budget (or at the very least the agency's budget could be slashed).

Congress, for all it's protestations and campaign promises, never intended to do away with earmarks.   They just do it in a sneakier way now.   Once again, the voters have been lied to.   But we expected that, didn't we?