'Earmarks' return to Congress, and Brian Higgins and Chris Jacobs cash in

Both Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, and Rep. Chris Jacobs, an Orchard Park Republican, cashed in on a change in congressional rules that restored "member requests" – otherwise known as earmarks or, more derisively, pork-barrel spending – to the federal appropriations process.

As a result, a huge federal spending bill passed by the House on Thursday includes, among many other things: $3.9 million to boost broadband service in Niagara and Orleans counties; $2 million for the Lockport Memorial Hospital Campus of Mount St. Mary’s Hospital; $1.5 million for Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center; and $1 million each for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Erie County Department of Health's effort to fight the opioid epidemic and the Shoreline Trail at the DL&W Terminal.

Such member items remain controversial, though, given their occasionally scandal-ridden history. And their return seems to have prompted a bout of legislative mixed feelings for dozens of House Republicans such as Jacobs, who requested earmarks only to vote in unison against the bill that included them.

“Seven important community funding project requests that would directly address needs in my district were included in today’s bill," Jacobs said on Thursday. "Unfortunately, Democrats characteristically packed the 'minibus' spending package with partisan spending and policies that our nation cannot afford, especially in the face of the record inflation their reckless spending has caused.”

Democrats also packed the $600 billion appropriations package with pork with no apparent partisan preferences. Democrats and Republicans alike were able to request special projects for their districts, and 333 of the House's 432 current members did so. Many, like Higgins and Jacobs, took home around $8 million.

And to hear Higgins tell it, that's the way it should be. He's long been an advocate of earmarks, viewing them both as the gas that can supercharge important local projects and the grease that keeps the legislative gears from sticking.

"Local representatives are in a much better position than anybody else to determine what the priorities should be" in their districts, Higgins said. "We're getting money out the door to be spent on good projects that produce economic growth, which is to everybody's benefit."

What's more, Congress wasn't so often gridlocked when leaders could offer a project here or a project there to curry favor with lawmakers on key legislation.

"If you go back to Lincoln, if you go back to (Lyndon) Johnson, you'd go back to the George W. Bush, all of them used the earmarking process to get their landmark legislation done," Higgins said.

Then again, Rep. Don Young and the late Sen. Ted Stevens, both Alaska Republicans, tried to use the earmarking process more than a decade ago to get the "Bridge to Nowhere" done. That proposed $398 million span from Ketchikan, Alaska, to an island with 50 residents never got built, but the controversy over it tainted pork-barrel spending of all kinds. As a result, the Republicans who took control of the House in 2011 banned earmarks.

But with Democrats back in charge of both houses of Congress this year for the first time in a decade, earmarks returned.

“In recent years, Congress has ceded too much of its constitutional authority over spending to the executive branch to make decisions about how and where to invest federal taxpayer dollars," the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said in announcing their return. "A rebalanced process will allow members to better utilize their knowledge and experience to thoughtfully direct federal funds, and do so with transparency and accountability.”

Of course, some people – like Sean Kennedy, director of policy and research at Citizens Against Government Waste – question just how rebalanced, transparent and accountable the new earmarking process will be.

"There's a competitive process to award funding that exists right now that has existed all along, and the job of the agencies that run that competitive process is to work within a finite budget and try to assign funding based upon need and the highest value and the best return on investment," Kennedy said. "Earmarking totally circumvents that process and instead kind of directs funding based upon the whim of legislators."

Local lawmakers argue their requested earmarks are based on need.

High-speed internet access remains spotty throughout rural areas of Jacobs' district, which is why the congressman has been pushing for expansion of rural broadband efforts like the one that would be funded through a federal earmark in Niagara and Orleans counties. Similarly, many of Higgins' earmarks look like a reflection of his yearslong efforts to boost Roswell Park and local waterfront amenities.

"We were very thoughtful about the projects we funded," Higgins said. "I wish we could do more."

It's unclear, though, whether even the earmarks that Higgins and Jacobs landed this week will make it through the legislative thicket. Some Republicans in the Senate, newly worried about federal spending, could try to block them.

"The overwhelming majority of the Republican conference in the Senate is not in favor of going back to earmarks,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said earlier this year.

However, McConnell may have trouble mustering the 41 Republican votes he would need to try to kill any spending bills that come laden with pork.

Why? Because as of early July, 15 of the 50 Republican senators had already requested pork-barrel spending items of their own.