The New York Times-20080129-President-s Tough Talk on Budget Earmarks Is Met With Questions on Timing

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President's Tough Talk on Budget Earmarks Is Met With Questions on Timing

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President Bush has never shown much distaste for Congressional pork.

But in his last year in office, with his party out of power on Capitol Hill, he declared Monday that he had had enough.

In the last seven years he has signed spending bills containing about 55,000 earmarks worth more than $100 billion for projects like a new lane for a local road, a new facade for a town landmark or a weapons contract for a company that happened to be a big donor to an influential lawmaker.

Such projects tucked into the endnotes of complex spending bills at the request of individual lawmakers with almost no oversight have contributed to a mounting pileup of waste and corruption, including sending the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the former congressman Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, to jail.

In his State of the Union address Monday night, Mr. Bush threatened to veto future spending bills unless Congress cut in half the number of earmarks, which now total more than 10,000 items and nearly $20 billion annually.

What is more, he told federal agencies to ignore any earmarks attached in the endnotes or reports appended to spending bills, a practice that makes them immune to amendment or excision in debate on the floor -- to the fury of their critics.

The late timing of his tough talk, though, drew mostly gentle derision from those critics.

Mr. Bush was notably silent on the subject until after his fellow Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. And, now that his power has waned, his threats are almost certain not to matter.

As lawmakers know, earmarks, which make up less up less than 1 percent of the federal budget, have incalculable political value. Congressional leaders award or withhold them to reward or punish lawmakers. Incumbents like to use federal money to curry favor with donors and constituents.

In fact, Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who has crusaded against earmarks, said when Republicans ran Congress, we honed the practice.

But complaining about earmarks is much easier when your party is not writing the spending bills.

I worry that earmark reform is something that Congressional minorities will always be the only ones to call for, kind of like a balanced budget, said Brian M. Riedl, a critic of earmarks at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Dick Armey, a former leader of the House Republicans who has become a vocal critic of earmarks, said that until the party's ouster from the majority the Republican speaker and Senate majority leader told the president, in effect, This pork is our deal.

With Democrats in charge, Mr. Armey said, He looks at it now and he says, 'The speaker and the majority leader are not going to help me on my deal anyway, so I might as well fight with them.'

You have got a group of people that for the last 12 years have been saying to their members, 'If you think you are having trouble with your re-election, come to us and we will help you out in the appropriations process,' he added, arguing that lawmakers in both parties had become addicted to earmarks.

In practical terms, Congress may be so distracted that it does not send Mr. Bush any spending bills for 2009 -- a common occurrence in presidential election years. Or Congressional Democrats may wait for a new president to sign the bills.

He is probably not going to get the bills to veto, said Steve Ellis, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks earmarks.

And despite Mr. Bush's instructions to ignore earmarks not included in the formal text of bills -- and thus immune to excision or amendment in floor debate -- federal agencies may still choose to spend the money anyway because the agencies will need to deal with the same Congressional spending committees for all their future budget requests, analysts and lawmakers said.

And Congress has an easy loophole: lawmakers might include a single sentence in a bill's text giving its endnotes or report the full force of law, this complying with the president's requirements without subjecting the earmarks to any additional debate.

In 2006, Democrats, then in the minority, made earmark overhaul a campaign theme. Last year, they passed laws requiring lawmakers for the first time to take public responsibility for the earmarks they added to spending bills. On Tuesday, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the House Democrats' campaign committee, called Mr. Bush late to game.

When the president and the Republican Congress had the power to address this, they did nothing, Mr. Van Hollen said.

Since the Democrats took control, however, House Republicans have become the most vocal critics of earmarks. Mr. Bush's embrace of overhauling earmarks comes as House Republicans are calling on the Democratic leaders to join them in a moratorium on such projects.

The House Republican conference, however, blocked a proposal by its leaders to stop seeking earmarks voluntarily as a way for the party to claim the higher ground. Under a longstanding informal agreement between the parties, the minority party is allowed to distribute to its members about 40 percent of the total federal money spent on earmarks, and Republican House members did not want to give up their share.

It is unfortunate that the president move is acting so late, Mr. Flake said, But there is also the irony of saying, please save us from ourselves, as if we need adult supervision.