Congress is under significant political pressure to reduce earmarks in appropriations legislation. Profligate spending and excessive earmaking cost Republicans in the 2006 election. Reforms have been promised, but there's been very little follow through. Indeed, the new Congressional appropriators are conspiring to keep earmarks in but hide them from the public. For years, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) tallied earmarks in pending legislation, but no more, as John Fund reports.
Democrats promised reform and instituted "a moratorium" on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS)--a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency--has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. . . .
Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan.
The reason? The appropriations committees are going to identify the earmarks themselves. Of course, as Fund reports, their definition of earmarks is a little bit more flexible. For instance, when challenged about one item in a recent appropriations bill, House committee Chair David Obey explained to a colleague: "The fact is, that an earmark is something that is requested by an individual member. This item was not requested by any individual member. It was put in the bill by me!" We should expect to see many more of Rep. Obey's projects lining appropriations bills in the future. Let the pork-barrel spending resume! [Link via Instapundit)
On a much larger scale, CRS has been slowly turning into a majority run agency. Kind of like GAO back in the late 80s and early 90s when the Democrats were in power. After the 94 takeover, the Republicans slashed GAO's budget.
In addition, CRS has that awful policy of saying analyst can't come to a conclusion. Just stupid and wrong. If the facts determine an end result why not say that instead of having to make up five or six options to balance a report out?!?!
Finally, CRS management has placed bureaucrats into senior analyst positions all the while pushing top researchers out of the service (Louis Fisher once with CRS is now in the Law Library).
Most employees at CRS work in an environment of fear and intimidation. Dan and Angela run the place like it's their personal playground. It is really sad because Congress does need an institution like CRS was designed to be.
The feds also used to do studies comparing the performance of students in public schools to the performance of students in private and charter schools. Under the Bush admin., those studies showed that public schools were generally as good. Then the feds announced they weren't going to do studies like this anymore. Could this have had anything to do with the fact that the Bush admin. loves vouchers and hates teachers' unions?
Just more evidence that the political parties really aren't as different as they'd like us to believe they are
It sounds like the people there were partisan Dems to begin with, but as long as Republicans were running the show, they used fairness and non-partisanship as a way of denying the GOP a partisan advantage. Now that Dems are in power, fairness goes out the window.
I wouldn't say that the analysts at CRS are partisan Democrats. Certainly they are liberal and probably voted Democratic at election time, but they seemed to me to be doing a good job of getting the facts right and serving Congress.
The problem lies with management. While I was still at CRS, Dan and Angela sent a directive out saying we should serve the MAJORITY (around 2004). This was done at the section meetings, not via a memo. At the time it really pissed me off that we were suppose to serve the Republicans more than the Democrats. I don't care which party is in power. CRS's purpose is to serve all of Congress. Speaking as a former employee of CRS and member of Congress, Congress would be better served abolishing that agency and creating a new one. Lots of dead weight and misdirected policy going on there.
Sounds to me more a case of Repubblies being hoisted on their own attempt to expose the former majority, said tool later simply exposing their own duplicitousness and greed.
PS: Great job deciphering MPE. The Constitution, though, not so much...Remember Alfredo's rule: read it like a love letter: what is there, what is not there, what is between the lines.