Pet Projects' Veil Is Only Partly Lifted

"Going to agencies outside the congressional process avoids any measure of transparency or accountability," said Ellen Miller of the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. "Earmarks remain and are just called by a different name."

So tainted is the word that lawmakers now tend to eschew it, using a more antiseptic phrase instead: "congressionally directed spending."

"They are trying to change the whole vernacular so that earmarks aren't earmarks anymore," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

To be sure, Ellis and Miller have lauded recent changes in the rules that govern special-interest spending. Congress has agreed to prohibit the once-common practice of dropping unaired, anonymously backed projects into House and Senate spending bills. In addition, expenditures identified as earmarks must be both clearly explained and publicly linked to their authors.

Congress appears to have reduced its hunger for earmarks this year. Member-disclosed earmarks passed by the House have fallen to about 6,000, with a cost of $8.5 billion -- less than half the number and total amount of two years ago, Taxpayers for Common Sense estimated.

But more legislating lies ahead, especially in the Senate, and "things don't tend to get smaller," Ellis said.

What's more, plenty of projects slip through the new disclosure requirements and cannot be easily accounted for. Programs inserted into spending bills at the request of executive branch officials, for example, are generally not considered earmarks, so lawmakers often try to persuade agency officials to request the pet projects they want -- thus avoiding that pejorative label.

In addition, if projects are included in legislation by the primary author of a spending bill -- usually the chairman of a committee -- those projects do not have to be as clearly marked as other earmarks. This is because formal earmarks are requested by members; if they appear in the starting-point bill, they are not considered earmarks.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) confronted David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, on the House floor in March over this practice, noting that a spending bill then under debate contained $35 million for a risk-mitigation program at a federal space-exploration facility, even though the measure had been certified to contain no earmarks.

"We have passed some good rules with regard to earmark reform and transparency," Flake said. "But we have found a way around them already." Obey said that the provision was not an earmark under the rules. "An earmark is something that is requested by an individual member," Obey said. "This item was not requested by any individual member; it was put in the bill by me."

Two months later, Obey again rebuffed Flake when Flake pointed out that a supposedly earmark-free bill on the House floor contained an allocation of $8.7 million to ward off floods in New York. The provision was not called an earmark, Flake noted, but Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) put out a news release applauding the provision and its potential benefit to her district.

Other lawmakers have ginned up support for narrow spending proposals through hearings. Two subcommittees of the House Science and Technology Committee pressed Energy Department officials in hearings this year, for example, about the department's decision to end its funding for the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, near Aiken, S.C.