Washington Metro says it will have to end weekend train service, close 19 rail stations, and reduce bus service by 45 percent if Congress doesn’t give the transit industry $32 billion (on top of normal federal funding of $13 billion) in 2021. In order to keep from making similar cuts, San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) says it will spend money that voters had approved for roads on transit instead. All over the country, transit agencies are preparing for doomsday, when they run out of the $25 billion that Congress gave them (in addition to the normal $13 billion) in 2020.
The New York Times editorial board thinks it has found the solution to problems like these: pork barrel. “Nothing greases the gears of government quite like pork,” it says. Specifically, the Times calls for a return to earmarks, which were banned in 2011 when a Tea Party-dominated Congress rebelled against wasteful spending.
During most of the twentieth century, Congress appropriated transportation dollars in general categories, such as airports, highways, and railroads, and gave them to state agencies to decide how best to spend them within broad guidelines. This was based on a philosophy of government that the local people understand their problems better than people sitting in offices in Washington DC.
The first highway earmarks, at least in the modern era, appeared in a 1982 federal transportation bill, which listed ten specific roads that were to be built with federal funds. President Reagan actually vetoed the bill but Congress overrode the veto.
Earmarks grew at an exponential rate, exceeding 6,000 by 2005. The House Transportation Committee became the largest committee in Congressional history as every member of Congress wanted to get in on the earmark action. Instead of just specifying highways for funding, earmarks were spending highway funds on completely unrelated activities including museums, national park visitor centers, and the restoration of a former slave ship (ships are transportation, right?).
It is important to understand that transportation earmarks did not represent any additional spending. Congress had already worked out how much money each state would get for highways and how much for transit. Earmarks took some of the money that the states were already getting and demanded that the money be spent on specific projects. Some of the projects may already have been on a state’s priority list and would have been built anyway. But the rest undermined the efficiency of government spending since it bumped low-priority (or no-priority) projects to the top of the list.
“Earmarks allow the people who presumably best understand a state or district — its elected officials — to direct federal dollars to where they are most needed,” says the Times. But if elected officials were truly the experts on every facet of their states or districts, we would need state and local transportation agencies to decide how best to administer funds.
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To a significant degree, earmarks are responsible for the infrastructure crisis that supposedly afflicts our transportation systems. Politicians would rather spend money building new projects than maintaining existing ones. Infrastructure that is funded out of user fees, such as toll roads or state highways, tends to be in good shape; the infrastructure that has maintenance problems tends to be for things that are politically funded, such as rail transit and local roads.
The Times thinks the solution to the problems with earmarking are to make them more transparent by requiring members of Congress to attach their names to earmarks. But that’s exactly what they want: to take credit for wasteful spending that benefits some wealthy or powerful special interest group. Earmarks mean more money will go to upper-income areas and less to lower-income areas; more money will go to construction of new projects and less to maintenance of existing ones; more money will go to things that will eventually be named for the members of Congress who used other people’s money to fund them and less to things we actually need.
The Times argues that earmarks would reduce the polarization that has recently afflicted public discourse by “restoring positive incentives for lawmakers to embrace negotiation and compromise.” But pork barrel has always had bi-partisan support because it is so easy for elected officials to boost their popularity by spending other people’s money, and in some ways even easier for them by spending money that doesn’t even exist. Neither of those are healthy for our economy.
The Times thinks that undermining “unelected bureaucrats” should particularly appeal to Republicans. But the unelected bureaucrats are merely a symptom of our real problem, which is that we have allowed the federal government to control such a large portion of out economy. No matter how it is designed, no government should have that much power.
Transit is suffering today because transit agencies failed to respond to declining ridership by cutting their costs. Rather than cut costs, BART even gave employees large raises, a decision that a member of the BART board of directors labeled “fiscally insane.”
Now, having failed to come to grips with the new reality of transportation after nine months of living with that reality, transit agencies expect Congress to bail them out with more money it doesn’t have. Such a bailout will encourage more waste and inefficiency. The Times‘ solution will only make that waste and inefficiency much worse.
Earmarks are inherently inefficient, but their administration is also a process that lends itself to corruption, since the pool of funds available for earmarking represents a source for the solicitation and distribution of favors.