Senate and House Offer Legislative Relief for (not so) Little Orphan Earmarks

U.S. Department of Transportation

Several weeks ago the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) posted a blog about a new effort by some in the United States Senate to bring back congressional earmarking (click here). The move, supporters say, is aimed at helping get more legislation through a gridlocked Washington. Earmarks have been banned for several years now, after citizen outrage of the billions of dollars being spent on earmarks and the corrupting influence they had on the political process.  Now, legislation aims to get rid of “orphan earmarks,” those earmarks that have remained “idle,” because of long-term delays and even cancellations.

In 2008, Congress responded to taxpayer outrage and instituted transparency rules for earmarks, and then in 2010, the House and Senate agreed to a two-year moratorium on earmarks. Though the moratorium was extended and most earmarks disappeared, there was still room in the Defense spending bill.  In fact, TPA uncovered 186 earmarks worth $7 billion (click here to see the full list) in the Defense Appropriations Bill that was part of H.R. 3547, the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act, aka the Omnibus appropriations bill.

The money that is put aside for earmarks in just one bill can be a staggering amount, as evidenced by the DoD spending bill mentioned above. Something important to note however is that sometimes the money is not spent immediately and at times just sits in an account. Taxpayer money is left unaccounted for, yet appropriated for pet projects that may never see the light of day. Just a few weeks ago, USA Today detailed this problem:

Just because Congress has banned new earmarks since 2010 doesn’t mean that the old earmarks went away.

In fact, some of those old congressional pet projects remain on the books despite the fact that the projects they support are long dead. And the earmark ban has had an unintended consequence: Congress can no longer find new homes for those unspent earmarks by simply writing new earmarks into spending bills.

The result is an “orphan” earmark, where money is trapped in a project that will likely never be built. According to the latest accounting by the Federal Highway Administration, there are $125.7 million in earmarks that that are more than 10 years old and remain more than 90% unspent. Some of them date back to 1989.

‘Orphan’ earmarks!? Taxpayers are probably shocked that such things exist.  Taxpayers should also be outraged that a process that bilked them out of hard earned money that was banned years ago could still cost them money.  There has been legislation introduced in the House and in the Senate that would rescind earmark funding at the Department of Transportation for idle earmarks. Last week, The Hill reported on the House version (H.R. 4715), introduced by Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.):

The bill, titled the Orphan Earmarks Act, would eliminate earmarked funds in Department of Transportation accounts that still had at least 90 percent left unobligated after 10 years… Lankford’s legislation would further require the Department of Transportation to submit an annual report on which projects received earmarked funding.

In the United States Senate, the man who Congressman Lankford is looking to replace, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), has also introduced legislation to eliminate these orphan earmarks at the Department of Transportation. Joining with the co-sponsor of the bill, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), S. 2370, also called the Orphan Earmarks Act, mirrors the House bill and would also eliminate unused earmarks within DOT.  The bill also targets the 90 percent or more remaining after 10 fiscal years and requires DOT to submit an annual report on any project which uses earmarked funds.

A CRS memo provided to Sen. Coburn outlines just how bad the problem is noting, “Even if Congress did not intend the grantees to have decades to decide whether to implement the projects, there is no budgetary mechanism to call attention to projects that are extremely delayed or to reallocate funding from inactive projects.”

Earmarks were banned for a reason, and TPA opposes any move to bring them back. What’s more troubling is the fact that long after the process has been eliminated, not only do some form of earmarks still live on in new legislation, such as defense spending, but there are hundreds of millions of unused taxpayer dollars earmarked years ago for projects that are likely never going to happen.

The House and Senate should pass the Orphan Earmarks bills and figure out ways to ensure that the ban on earmarks remains in place. There should also be serious efforts to end the de facto earmarking that we have seen from Congress as recently as last month when the National Defense Authorization Act passed the House. TPA will continue to monitor efforts to fight the return of earmarks, and expose any forms of earmarks championed by any member in Congress.