Fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers

Without a line-item veto — struck down the by U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 — President George W. Bush lacks the arsenal necessary to truly combat congressional earmarks. But the omnibus spending bill passed last week contains so much egregious and wasteful special-interest pork that the president may take extraordinary action.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the approach could so anger members of the House and Senate that they would use their power to set budgets to punish federal agencies which fail to release funds for their pet projects.

Oh, that’s actually good news, also.

Of course, does the president so want to alienate Congress that anything he proposes will be dead on arrival next year? Perhaps that depends on whether enough Republicans are actually willing to live up to their supposed devotion to smaller government and fiscal responsibility.

On Thursday, the president ordered his aides to review the nearly 9,000 earmarks contained in the omnibus spending bill. Theoretically, he could simply refuse to fund many of them, shifting the money to other areas.

Majority Democrats, who ran on promises to reform the earmark process, “have not made enough progress,” Mr. Bush said. “And so, I’m instructing budget director Jim Nussle to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.”

In meddling with congressional earmarks, the president would be relying on various legal opinions which state that because the pork projects aren’t specified in actual spending bills — they’re usually included in tables and charts that accompany the bills in an effort to signal congressional intent — the executive branch is under no obligation to fund such spending.

But where to start? With thousands of special-interest goodies crammed into last week’s spending measure, the administration has much work to do. Thankfully, though, The Washington Post this week has highlighted a good place to start.

In 2005, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, secured a $500,000 earmark for the InTune Foundation Group of Beverly Hills, Calif. — a “music education” group run by one of his campaign contributors. Under terms of the grant, the group was supposed to turn in a report documenting how it spent the taxpayer money.

As of last week, that report hadn’t been filed, even though it was due in September of 2006.

Nevertheless, Rep. Hoyer decided to hook taxpayers again by including another $400,000 earmark for the foundation in the omnibus bill passed last week.

“If he was really concerned and worried about his fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayer, he should have pulled that earmark,” Leslie K. Paige of the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste, told the Post.

It gets even worse.

“InTune’s earlier earmark was supposed to be spent on creating lesson plans on funk music and Nobel Peace laureates, according to its paperwork submitted to the government,” the Post noted. “In those documents, the foundation said it would spend thousands of dollars from that grant to have an educator, Joan Kozlovsky, evaluate the project in 2005 and 2006. Kozlovsky told The Post that she did no such work and hadn’t been paid by the foundation.”

Certainly, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of other equally dubious earmarks — supported by Democrats and Republicans, alike. And it’s equally certain that the necessary wrist raps of any effort by the president to rein in congressional pork spending should be distributed evenly across both sides of the aisle.

The Hoyer “music education” earmark made the list of Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Most Egregious Pork-Barrel projects.” That’s a list the president’s budget director should Google if the administration is indeed serious about inching us closer to responsible budgeting.