Washington Pork

WASHINGTON — So much for trimming the pork. The practice of decorating legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is still thriving on Capitol Hill — despite public outrage that helped flip control of Congress two years ago. More than 11,000 of those "earmarks," worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year, keeping the issue at the center of Washington's culture of money, influence and politics. Now comes an election-year encore. It's a pay-to-play sandbox where waste and abuse often obscure the good that earmarks can do. An examination of many of those earmarks by The Associated Press and two dozen newspapers participating in a project sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors found much greater disclosure since 2006 but no end to what has become ingrained behavior in Congress. Assisting the project were two nonprofit and nonpartisan watchdog organizations — the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Millions of the dollars support lobbying firms that help companies, universities, local governments and others secure what critics like Republican presidential candidate John McCain call pork-barrel spending. The law forbids using federal grants to lobby, but lobbyists do charge clients fees that often equal 10% of the largesse. Earmark winners and their lobbyists often reward their benefactors with campaign contributions. For many members of Congress, especially those on the Appropriations committees, such as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., campaign donations from earmark-seeking lobbyists and corporate executives are the core of their fundraising. Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes find ways to skirt them. "I know a bunch of members that if you go in to see them, somewhere in the conversation they somehow say, 'Well, we were looking through our list of campaign contributors and didn't happen to see you there,"' said Frank Cushing, a lobbyist with the National Group, which lobbies on appropriations bills. "Is there a quid pro quo? No, not directly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to figure it out."