The Phantom Earmark

Benjamin Kantack
UNL Political Science and Spanish Major


When weeks of debate finally drew to a close as the economic stimulus bill cleared Congress, President Obama proudly announced that it passed without a single earmark.

Congress’s next item of business claimed no such distinction.

The “omnibus spending bill,” which distributes monies allocated by Congress since the last budget, is suffocating under a grand total of about 9,000 earmarks. The omnibus also strikes a personal note with the President: his name is listed as a sponsor for one particular earmark worth $7.7 million, according to an article by Congressional Quarterly. Said earmark, which would increase funding to two tribal vocational facilities, was cosponsored by then-Senator Obama and 36 other Congress members last April.

But $7.7 million is a drop in the bucket – comprising less than .1% of the total omnibus earmark price of $9 billion – and members of the President’s staff are attached to greater amounts of pork spending: among other examples, Vice President Joe Biden is listed in $94.9 million worth of earmarks, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have run up pork tabs of $227.4 million and $108 million respectively.

But what shocks more than these impressive figures is that the President and the Senate Appropriations Committee are trying to cover up the earmark. A February 26 article in the Washington Post reported that the President’s name will be erased from the sponsor list before it comes to a vote. Why? According to a White House spokesman, then-Senator Obama’s request for spending on the two vocational schools – one in New Mexico, the other in North Dakota – was never intended to become an earmark. The letter petitioning for the funds was signed by 37 senators in April of 2008, and was attached to the omnibus just recently.

So what makes the President’s request an earmark now, but not back when he signed it? The Appropriations Committee says that the defining feature which makes the item an earmark is the fact that it mentions the two schools by name. Yet when the facility was funded in the past, the program which administered the money distributed it to the same two schools. The original request and the “earmark” are identical in every way except for what they are called.

Even more confounding, the President still supports the omnibus. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal that the President would sign the bill once Congress approved it, despite the earmark. Clearly, President Obama still supports the vocational school spending enough to enact the law, but not enough to have his name attached to it as a cosponsor. Does it bode well for America when a president is too ashamed to cosponsor a spending item that he himself signs into law?

TIME Magazine stated on February 26 that President Obama “runs a real credibility risk when he makes exceptions to his own rules.” From an administration that promised ethical conduct and transparency, the cover-up of $7.7 million is a slap in the face to the American people. This writer does not ask that the President remove the earmark entirely – simply that he own up to his actions and not hide them out of shame.