House Defense Authorizers Beat Earmark Ban
New guidelines from the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) provide a step-by-step guide to ensure that members continue to play a role in saying how taxpayer dollars are spent on military gear despite bans on earmarks.
HASC Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) issued the how-to as part of the committee’s procedure for developing the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill. It shows members how to file a budgetary legislative proposal.
“The old system of setting aside pots of money for members based on a seniority sliding scale to earmark to their districts or companies is a relic of a bygone age,” McKeon says . “The American people want to know that their taxpayer dollars are being spent efficiently and effectively on the nation’s defense.”
The statement stressed in an underlined sentence that the “budgetary legislative proposal is NOT a congressional earmark pursuant to House rule XXI.”
Still, the proposed procedures would do something close to what an earmark does — provide funding for a project that the administration did not request.
Even before the new Congress welcomed a host of freshmen eager to pare back the deficit, earmarks had fallen out of favor on Capitol Hill. The administration itself took aim at congressionally directed spending, most notably defining the F136 alternative engine for the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter as an earmark and using that to argue against funding it.
The HASC, which does not define the alternate engine as an earmark, has a long history of directing funding to specific projects. Traditionally, the ranking member of the committee asks the service chiefs of staff to provide a list of unfunded requirements for which Congress may eventually pick up the tab.
But McKeon and other members of the committee signed on to last year’s ban on earmarks and have crafted rules that provide additional transparency in some regards and less in others.
Under the new rules, only committee members can offer the proposals as amendments to the bill, which will be voted on by the full panel. The amendments also have to spell out how they would be useful to the military and ask for a specific amount of money. The proposals must not direct spending to a specific locality or vendor, and be awarded competitively or through a merit-based selection process.
Steve Ellis, spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense, indicated that this could be an improvement over past practices. “Even if earmarks went through this process, it would have a dramatic impact in terms of numbers,” he says, because the proposals have to come from members of the committee and will be voted on.
“We’re still going to have to look at this very closely to see how it shakes out,” Ellis says. “But they certainly get marks for creativity.”
Photo: Architect of the Capitol
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