Byrd still bringing home earmarks

By Jake Stump

CHARLESTON — There are new rules for earmarking, and as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd helped put them in place.

He’s following the new rules, too, but that doesn’t mean he’s not snagging federal dollars for projects in his home state.

Byrd has helped earmark nearly $229 million in three major spending bills for fiscal year 2008. Most of that money will find its way to West Virginia.

One bill is for transportation and housing, one is for defense, and one is for labor, health and education.

Byrd, D-W.Va., who has been labeled the ‘King of Pork’ by critics, earlier this year announced the new rules to overhaul the way lawmakers earmark taxpayer dollars.

The iconic senator required that all earmarks — footnotes in bills that lawmakers use to allocate funds for pork projects — be clearly identified in documents accompanying appropriations legislation. Previously, lawmakers could anonymously insert earmarks into legislation.

Byrd’s largest single allocation is a $54 million earmark in the defense spending bill

for the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in Mineral County.

Located in Rocket Center, the lab employs more than 1,000 people and manufactures composite structures for F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft and other aerospace projects. The facility also produces 30mm shells for Apache helicopters, grenades, sensors, mortars and warheads.

The laboratory has named most of its offices after the senator, such as the Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex and the Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing.

Byrd’s allocation will help modernize some of the lab’s buildings, which date back to the World War II era.

His second-largest allocation is $18 million to digitize records at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. That, too, was inserted into the federal defense spending bill.

The AFIP is a federal government institution headquartered at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. For decades, it had relied on an old system of physically shipping medical slides from distant facilities to its headquarters.

Now that’s changing, as the agency is digitizing data for the soldiers and veterans it serves.

Byrd’s third-largest earmark, at $16 million, came in a transportation spending bill to support Corridor H, a four-lane highway that has been in the works for nearly 20 years.

In 1988, the highway received its first funding in the amount of $16 million. That was the beginning of a 135-mile road that will connect Interstate 79 at Weston to near I-66 and I-81 near Strasburg, Va.

The project had been ridiculed nationwide as the “Robert Byrd Road to Nowhere,” but completion of the highway has remained a top priority for West Virginia officials who want to open up the rural, north-central part of the state to the Eastern Seaboard.

Other Byrd-sponsored earmarks this year include a pair of $8 million allotments for improvements to W.Va. 2 and W.Va. 9.

Of the three major 2008 spending bills, Byrd sponsored $144.62 million in the defense and military spending legislation.

He earmarked $52.48 million in the transportation bill, and $31.87 million in the labor, health and education bill. Overall, the latter measure is the largest domestic spending bill for 2008 and contains more than 2,200 items designating $1 billion for hospitals, schools, colleges, museums and social services.

Despite what might seem an ample amount of pork spending, an analysis from independent watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste shows that the Democratic-controlled Congress has dramatically slashed earmark spending compared to two years ago, when Republicans were at the helm.

Earmarks in fiscal year 2008 appropriations bills total around $20 billion, which is down 33 percent from the $29 billion designated in 2006 spending bills.

One of the most sizeable changes came in the defense bill, as this year’s $6.6 billion in defense appropriations pales in comparison to the $14.9 billion in earmarks for 2006.

With Byrd controlling the action in the Senate Appropriations Committee, he has reduced funding for unneeded pork projects and brought a sense of responsibility to the earmarking process, said his spokesman, Jesse Jacobs.

“There is no question that the earmarking process has grown to excessive levels in recent years,” Jacobs said.

He noted that between 1956 and 2002, Congress passed 20 highway bills that contained a total of 739 earmarks. But in 2005, under Republican leadership, Congress passed and the president signed a single highway bill that included 5,000 earmarks, Jacobs said.

The Associated Press reported in April that Sens. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., pressured Congress to introduce a transparency to the process, leading to Byrd issuing the new rules.

“We have added new transparency and accountability to this process,” Jacobs said.

Byrd also required that every member certify in writing that neither they nor their family have any financial interest in their earmarks.

“I have always maintained the highest standards for myself and for my staff on insuring that there are no conflicts of interest for earmarks that I include in legislation,” Byrd said in a speech earlier this year.

In that same speech, Byrd also defended the earmarking process, saying that not all spending is wasteful.

“Earmarks are arguably the most criticized and the least understood of Congressional practices,” Byrd said. “There is nothing inherently wrong with an earmark. It is an explicit direction from the Congress about how the federal government should spend the people’s money.”

The senator acknowledged that earmarks have helped fund children’s hospitals, emergency food and shelter programs and the Human Genome Project.Still, some earmarks have received heavy scrutiny this year.

A $130,000 earmark requested by Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, will fund a library and museum honoring first ladies. The library was founded by Regula’s wife and the director is the congressman’s daughter.

Sens. Coburn and John McCain, R-Ariz. both criticized that specific earmark as McCain called it one of “many wasteful items tucked away in this bill.”

Also criticized is a $2 million earmark for a public service center named after Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. The center will feature an office that houses Rangel’s papers and memorabilia.