Earmarks and a teaser

View 714 Thursday, February 23, 2012

In Defense of Earmarks

The Constitution gives Congress control of the purse strings. Congress works through a system of committees. It’s not possible for every Member and Senator to be an expert on everything the government spends money on.

Now on the principle of subsidiarity, that should mean that many of the decisions made by Congress ought to be delegated to much lower levels. Left to the states, or even to local school boards and tax districts.

On the other hand, to pursue a strategy of technology – as an example – specific decisions have to be made. In military research and development it is quite possible to have legitimate disagreements on policy. On the other hand, if you don’t have the technology you can’t take certain directions. You can’t build weapons that you don’t know how to build.

At these levels it is quite possible that individual Congressmen have good ideas for development projects that are not favored by the Administration. Much of our military technology has been developed due to funds specifically allocated in authorization and appropriation bills. Then there is service politics: the Air Force will no relinquish any fixed wing air missions, but in fact the Air Force doesn’t like to do close support of the field army, or interdiction and isolation of the battle area. The Air Force doesn’t like Warthogs, and being assigned as a Warthog pilot is generally considered a career ending post. Most of the close support and interdiction missions turn out to be flown by Air National Guard units – and most of the appropriations for the aircraft and weapons needed for those missions has been through legislative direction – i.e. earmarks.

I could give other examples, but I think the point is made. The Constitution specifically gives the Federal Government the right to build post offices and post roads, and in the early days of the Republic there was considerable competition for funding of post offices in various small communities. Log rolling – you vote for my local project and I’ll vote for yours – has been with us since the first Congress. It’s part of the oil that keeps the system running.

Now it’s true enough that Earmark Projects will increase without number if there is no limit placed on them. Part of that is the Iron Law – once something is established there is always a lobby for it, and since everyone pays but few benefit directly you get a force for the appropriation and only a generalized ‘turn them all out!’ opposition. That too is the way the world works.

Earmarks need to be controlled by rules. They should always be open, voted on by the relevant committee, not thrust into the appropriation in the dead of night by an influential Member. They should be debated. But they should not simply be ended. Sometimes individual Congressmen have pet projects that really do benefit all of us. That particularly happens in the sciences, where there would be very little contrarian research and development if the Big Science consensus controlled the appropriations. Earmarks can be for very silly projects, and fund very silly ideas; but they are not really a very large part of the budget, and for every dozen or two pork barrel museums and preservations of the birthplace of some obscure community favorite son, there will be sound research and development that leads to useful technology. The DC/X could be classed as an earmark; and the country is better off for having funded it. It was rammed down the throat of the expendable rocket industry which has no incentive to develop technology for reusable rockets.

I’m in favor of having a brighter spotlight put on earmark appropriations, but it would be a very bad idea simply to eliminate them.

I’m still trying to recover from this upper respiratory things. I think I am recovering – I thought I would be recovered enough to go to my LASFS meeting tonight – but it’s slow. When it came time to go out, I stayed home and watched mindless TV. I’m now trying the zinc stuff: I don’t really believe in it, but I have recommendations from MD readers who say they don’t believe in it either but they’ve seen it work and use it themselves… I took a long nap after lunch and still didn’t feel up to going out. Sable is making it very clear that she is entitled to walks, and why aren’t we doing it>

I’m working on it.

But at least some things get done. I think we have the final version of the latest Niven-Pournelle-Barnes project.