McCain's Phony Earmark Ploy

If elected, John McCain pledges to veto any bill with earmarks. McCain touts his opposition to earmarks as a crusade against corruption and waste. However, some observers suspect that McCain's pledge to fight earmarks is just another power grab for the executive branch.

"I got an old ink pen, my friends, and the first pork-barrel-laden earmark, big spending bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it. You will know their names. I will make them famous, and we'll stop this corruption," McCain said at a campaign stop in Washington, D.C., this week.

McCain claims that eliminating earmarks could save the federal government $100 billion over two years without cutting funding for federal agencies. This claim is dubious at best. If McCain were to make good on his promise, it would effectively be an assault on the power of the legislative branch. "No president likes earmarks because they impinge on the latitude of the executive branch to spend on the things they want to fund," says Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has written extensively on earmarks.

So, just what are these earmarks we hear so much about? It turns out, even the experts aren't sure. Basically, an earmark is money that's directed for a specific program or project. When McCain rails against earmarks, it's safe to say that he's only objecting to money targeted by Congress, not money set aside by the president or requested by federal agencies that serve under the executive branch.

"It's hard to say how much federal money is spent on earmarks because there is no formal or widely accepted definition," says James Horney, director of federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Horney notes that when the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service tried to estimate the amount of money spent through earmarks, the analysts had to come up with a different definition for each of the 13 appropriations bills they studied.

Even McCain's advisers aren't sure where he got the $100 billion figure, but the number is probably from the CRS study, which concluded that the federal government spends about $67 billion dollars a year on earmarks, an unusually high estimate. The number is so high because the study counted virtually every targeted expenditure as an earmark. For example, Horney explains that the CRS study counted "practically all our foreign aid money" as an earmark because the appropriations bill sets aside different pots of money for different countries. "Aid to Israel is specified in that bill," says Horney. "That's almost certainly not what John McCain is talking about. He doesn't want to cut aid to Israel."

Defense appropriations and foreign aid account for the lion's share of the $67 billion. Given McCain's pledge not to cut defense spending, it's unclear how he could save $50 billion a year by eliminating earmarks.

Earmarks are additions to appropriations bills that specify how that money is going to be spent. Typically, these riders don't authorize new spending. Let's say an appropriations bill sets aside $500 million for road construction. A member might add an earmark stipulating that $10 million of that money will be spent on a road in his district. Eliminating the earmark wouldn't save money overall because that $10 million will go to road projects one way or the other. The only question is who will choose which roads will be built. When the earmark for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere was canceled, Sarah Palin's administration spent that money on other transportation projects.

If earmarks were abolished, the president and his appointees at federal agencies would decide which roads to build. The argument for taking discretion away from Congress and giving it to the president and federal agencies is that dispassionate experts can make the decision with the good of the whole country in mind, whereas legislators have a vested interest in securing money for their own districts.