The Swine Line

This article in today’s Bozeman Daily Chronicle provides a fascinating close-up of how pork-barrel politics works.  Read it all, but I was especially intrigued by this lengthy dissertation on the lobbying expenditures of Montana State University to keep the pork-and-gravy-train rolling, even after the so-called earmark moratorium of 2007.  You can see why Congress is loath to give earmarking up voluntarily.  There are just too many rapacious middlemen/women depending upon the money now: 

So how is it that MSU, a mid-size college in a state with more cows than people, far from the academic powerhouses of the Ivy League or West Coast, surpasses better-known universities in winning congressional earmarks?

It seems doubly surprising since the 2006 defeat of Montana’s Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, who bragged of bringing $2 billion home to Montana from Washington, thanks to his seat on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Burns was honored annually by roomfuls of MSU scientists and once given a Wheaties box that declared him a “champion of science.”

The man who beat him, Democrat Jon Tester, ran for the Senate criticizing earmarks inserted into bills in the dead of night without accountability.

Tester became part of the new Democratic Congress that made its first order of business passing reforms designed to make earmarks more transparent, requiring sponsors’ names and earmarks’ purposes be revealed. Congress’s new leaders then declared they had banned earmarks from the new 2007 budget bills.

All that appeared to spell trouble for MSU, which had more than $30 million in earmarks riding on the 2007 budget bills that the old Republican Congress failed to pass.

But after boasting of the earmark ban in 2007, lawmakers from both parties, including Tester, lobbied federal agencies behind the scenes to grant their 2008 spending requests, such as $1 million for rangeland restoration at MSU, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed.

After being nearly wiped out in 2007, earmarks bounced back in 2008 to $14 billion. Still, that’s less than half their 2006 peak of $29 billion, according to the fedgazette, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

The pork barrel may be leaner, but millions of dollars are still rolling MSU’s way.

How is MSU so successful?

For one thing, MSU works at it, sending President Geoff Gamble, Vice President for Research Tom McCoy, and sometimes scientists like Lee Spangler to Washington, D.C., to make the case for MSU projects.

MSU also hires a lobbying firm, Van Scoyoc Associates, which was paid $184,000 last year to represent the Bozeman campus and its three smaller sister campuses. MSU leaders contend the firm’s main job is to track federal agencies’ research opportunities, not lobby Montana’s representatives.

For another thing, Montana only has three elected representatives in Congress, but they have enough clout to secure millions of dollars for MSU and its research, which they see as important for the state’s economy and, no doubt, for their own reputations as leaders who can bring home the bacon to Montana.

“It is as much a credit to the quality of the research work of our faculty and students that causes us to get support from the federal government,” said Cathy Conover, vice president for communications and public affairs. “The media focuses on the ‘bridge to nowhere’ kind of project. I’m sure there are those out there. We’re proud of the projects that have received earmarked funding.

“If the research itself is solid, that to us is the important bottom line,” Conover said.

That last comment is a crock.  If the research itself is so solid, why not compete for the money and allow it to flow through normal, merit-based program channels?  The whole point of earmarking is NOT to level the playing field or ensure that the little guys get their fair share…it is to circumvent the entire budget and spending process, to bypass the any rational, peer-reviewed decision-making process and get the money through back-channels.  There is NO way anyone can know whether it is solid or not. 

And, for $184,000 per year in fees, how much in pork do you guess that a lobbying firm would have to deliver to make that worthwhile to the university’s bottom line?  There has to be a return on that investment and it only takes one $1 million earmark to make it worth the investment.  And how much money flows into the campaign coffers of the Montana delegation from the folks who stand to gain from getting those earmarks?    Connect the dots!