Defining a Legislative Earmark: How The Chronicle Conducted Its Analysis

One of the most difficult parts of any effort to determine how much Congress gives out in earmarks is figuring out

just what to include.

As a starting point for its analysis of how much money charities received, The Chronicle used the annual report produced by Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit group that goes through each spending bill passed by Congress looking for money that lawmakers specifically earmarked for nonprofit groups and other organizations.

The Washington watchdog organization, which calls such earmarks “pork” and wants them eliminated, publishes the most comprehensive list of Congressional earmarks.

For the 2005 fiscal year, which started October 1, 2004, and ends September 30, the organization found that Congress gave out $27.3-billion in earmarked money.

Citizens Against Government Waste defines earmarks as any Congressionally directed award that meets at least one of the following criteria:

• Requested solely by the House or the Senate.
• For a program that is not specifically authorized by Congress.
• Not competitively awarded.
• Not sought by the president in his budget request to Congress.
• Greatly in excess of the president’s budget request or the amount awarded in the previous fiscal year.
• Awarded without being the subject of Congressional hearings.
• For a program that serves only a local or special interest.

Some other critics of the earmarking process, however, think that Citizens Against Government Waste’s definition is too expansive. For example, in some cases Congress greatly increases the amount the president has proposed spending on a program that has already received specific approval from Congress and would not fall under anyone’s definition of “pork.” For that reason, The Chronicle omitted from its study any group that had received more from Congress than the president wanted — as long as it was for a program that Congress had specifically authorized in other legislation.

Many charities cited as recipients of earmarks by Citizens Against Government Waste told The Chronicle that they had been included in a White House budget request at some point in the past two decades, but not in the 2005 fiscal year.

Numerous organizations said the only reason federal agencies did not include them in their requests to Congress each year was that the agencies knew that the charities and their programs had broad support on Capitol Hill, and therefore lawmakers would want to add money for them into spending bills. By omitting them from the president’s original budget request to Congress, the agencies were able to include funds for other programs that they might otherwise have had to cut from their spending plans. Such groups were not included in The Chronicle’s analysis.

Other groups have tried to develop their own definitions of earmarks. One of the most comprehensive attempts was conducted last year by the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress.

In analyzing the number and dollar amount of earmark from 1994 through 2004, the service’s researchers decided that they could not responsibly use a single set of definitions for all of the 13 appropriations bills passed annually by Congress. Instead, they decided that each set of appropriations was so distinctive that they had to come up with 13 sets of definitions — one for each bill.

Those definitions vary so widely from bill to bill, in fact, that the Congressional Research Service report cautions against using its data to sum up earmark spending from all the appropriations annually, saying the “varying definitions and methodologies applied would render such a total invalid.”