Earmarks Spiral Out of Control

Congressional earmarks for transportation have steadily increased from 167 earmarks worth $800 million a decade ago to well over 2,000 earmarks costing $3.3 billion in 2005. Then, says the US DOT Inspector General, they took a huge leap upward in 2006, with more than 8,000 earmarks costing $8.5 biliion.

If you believe in government planning, then earmarks represent a theft from taxpayers because they divert money away from the projects that planners think make the most sense to projects that members of Congress want to help their re-election campaigns. But the Antiplanner considers earmarks to be a natural result of comprehensive, long-range planning.

Modern-day transportation networks are simply too complicated for anyone to understand. A typical urban area may have a million travelers, each making several trips from perhaps a half million origins to a half million destinations each day. Adding freight deliveries makes it even more complicated.

The engineering approach is to look at where there are safety and engineering problems and fix those problems. The economic approach is to charge everyone user fees and create decentralized transport providers who are motivated by those fees to provide transport services to those who pay them.
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The comprehensive, long-range planning approach is to try to calculate the various environmental, social, land-use, and other impacts of all that travel. But this problem is too big to deal with. Chaos theory teaches us that, in complex situations like this, tiny differences in initial conditions can lead to huge differences in outcomes, so no one can predict the long-range needs for such a network. So decisionmakers — whether planners or legislators — fall back on their own preferences.

Between 1981, when Congress started diverting highway user fees to transit, and 1991, when Congress passed ISTEA, decisions about transportation were transferred from the engineers to the planners. The result is that the decisions were based less on narrow, highly quantifiable criteria and more on broad and vague generalities. Since the criteria were so vague, members of Congress felt free to inject their own preferences via earmarking.

Way back in 1950, a University of Michigan economist named Shorey Peterson predicted this would happen if the planners took over. “The inclination of the engineers to whom road-planning is largely entrusted has been to define and apply appropriate standards in transportation terms,” said Peterson. “It is in the character for the engineer to be mainly concerned, not with broad matters of public interest, but with specific relations between road types and traffic conditions.”

Attempting to account for the “public interest,” warned Peterson, would lead to “the wildest and most irreconcilable differences of opinion.” “Controlled in this way, highway projects are peculiarly subject to ‘pork barrel’ political grabbing.” And that is exactly what happened.