In this year’s State of the Union address, President George W. Bush came out strongly against congressional earmarks and vowed to cut their number in half.
“The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks, special interest projects that are often snuck in at the last minute, without discussion or debate,” Bush said.
Earmarks can also be a valuable source of funding for higher education – which is why University President Henry Bienen had a different take on the situation, saying he did not consider earmarks for university spending wasteful.
“He didn’t seem to come out against them when he had a Republican Congress,” Bienen said. “Now it’s a Democratic Congress, so he’s been fighting the earmark battle.”
Earmarks – spending guidelines that representatives and senators can attach to spending bills, directing agencies how to spend federal funds – have been criticized by many as undemocratic and as channels for special interests to sneak in wasteful proposals located in representatives’ home districts. This year’s budget request contains $7.5 billion dollars worth of earmarks.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s last tally of earmarks for academia, made in 2003, found that higher education received $2 billion dollars in earmarks that year.
In contrasting higher education earmarks, Bienen cited the famous example of Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) 2005 attempt to earmark hundreds of millions of dollars to build a bridge from the Alaskan mainland to Gravina Island, population 50.
“These aren’t bridges to nowhere,” Bienen said. “About 90 percent of them have been for facilities or equipment. Occasionally we’ll ask for some programmatic money.”
The Office of Management and Budget’s Web site lists eight earmarks for projects at Northwestern over the past four fiscal years, amounting to approximately $6 million.
Projects include a nanotechnology program, development of a better power supply for aircraft weapons and a program for the study of juvenile delinquency and substance abuse.
The most recent allocation is $231,000 for construction of the molecular therapeutics and diagnostics building, placed in the budget by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose office did not return requests for comment.
The Association of American Universities, an organization in Washington, D.C., that represents the interests of 60 different universities including NU, intends to continue to seek funding for universities through earmarks, said Barry Toiv, spokesman for the association.
Toiv said the only time earmark funding should be opposed is if it circumvented the peer-reviewed funding processes of agencies such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.
“Our big concern is we’re particularly concerned with the agencies that have always focused on peer review or merit review,” Toiv said. “We want to make sure that they are protected first of all and we’re concerned to the extent that any earmarks don’t crowd out peer-reviewed science.”
Bruce Layton, special assistant to NU’s president for governmental relations, wrote in an e-mail that he thought that there was little chance that NU would feel the ill effects of a crunch in earmark funding, adding that President George W. Bush has already taken actions that may be seen as contrary to the spirit of his announcement.
“There has been no change in policy, only talk, including criticism from President Bush about Congressional earmarks,” Layton wrote. “The President’s own budget proposes funding for many special projects that would be considered ‘earmarks’ if they were initiated through the Congressional appropriations process.”
Layton also wrote that the amount of funding NU received from earmarks was negligible.
“At Northwestern, Congressional earmarks represent a very small portion – a fraction of a percent – of our annual federal research funding,” Layton wrote, “so we are much more concerned about the slow growth in the major research funding budgets.”
Bienen said he frequently visits Washington, D.C., to request funding for the university, and that it is often a question of chance how much the university can manage to obtain.
“A lot of (earmarks) are silly and wasteful,” Bienen said. “I don’t think that the ones universities get are wasteful, but that’s a self-interested argument of course.”
