FAVORS IN FINE PRINT: Defense spending bill packed with $11.8B in earmarks

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jan/Feb 2008 by Heath, David

You'd think it'd be easy to track down an 85-foot boat, especially one that Congress ordered the Navy to buy. But call after call to a high-level Navy spokesman led to a lot of promises to check on it and get back to me. Then, finally, this: They knew nothing about the boat.

It was baffling because I'd already found the vessel on my own and told the Navy where to look-next to a University of Washington pier right in the heart of Seattle.

"Yes, that boat is here at the UW," Russell McDuff, director of the School of Oceanography, told me. Turns out the Navy had no use for the $4.5 million boat and had "loaned" it to the university without bothering to take delivery first. The school could never find a use for it either, so McDuff had asked the Navy months earlier to come take it back.

The useless boat was just one of thousands of purchases in recent years that Congress forced the military to make. This micromanagement of military spending is done through earmarks buried in appropriation bills, a legislative trick invented by lobbyists, usually to funnel tax dollars directly to one of their clients.

Guardian Marine International, the company that sold the Navy the $4.5 million boat, was a floundering business ran out of the CEO's house in Edmonds, Wash. But shortly after the company's founder started giving money to the campaign of Rep. Norm Dicks, the Congressman got the company their first earmark. That was followed by more donations and three more earmarks, including a boat the Coast Guard gave away to a county sheriff and the boat the Navy loaned to the University of Washington.

In all, taxpayers spent more than $ 17 million on Guardian Marine boats, while the company's three executives gave more than $50,000 to the campaigns of a select few in Congress.

It's a pattern one critic calls "circular fundraising." It may be legal, says Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, but it has the smell of kickbacks.

At The Seattle Times, we wanted to know how widespread this practice was. Could it be that earmarks were a fundraising tool? Answering that question proved to be the most daunting challenge of my career.

Buried details

Earmarks are shrouded in secrecy, which is amazing given their explosive growth and sheer volume. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, earmarks didn't exist. Yet by 2005, the Congressional Research Service estimated the taxpayers spent $52 billion to pay for more than 16,000 earmarks.

Still, an obvious question-"Where's all that money going?"-is nearly impossible to answer. For starters, if you carefully read all 12 appropriations bills passed last year, you won't find many earmarks. Congress hides them in a separate document called the conference committee report.

And I mean it when I say they hide them. While the bill is all text-usually simple to capture electronically and throw into a database-Congress tinkers with the format of the earmarks to make them difficult to gather. Staffers convert the text to an image and then shrink the type down so that it is 1/20th of an inch, much smaller than newspaper agate type. This makes scanning the pages and converting the material back to text an onerous chore.

After spending several mind-numbing days doing this on my own, two interns came to my rescue. Liz Burlingame and Chanel Merritt from the University of Washington were not only willing to help but seemed bent on a mission.

We zeroed in on the 2007 defense bill, one of only two spending bills that passed Congress last year, and found 2,700 earmarks costing a total of $11.8 billion.

But cataloguing earmarks reveals little by itself. They read like a secret code, cryptic phrases with dollar amounts attached. Now came the hard part: figuring out who got the money.

The only decent source for that information were press releases from members of Congress boasting about the bacon they'd brought home. We went to the Web site of each member of Congress and carefully searched for any release about the defense bill. We knew we weren't going to find all earmarks this way, but we hoped to get a large enough sample to do meaningful analysis of campaign contributions. We found statements from 277 of the 535 members of Congress and put all of them into a database.

The quality of press releases ran the gamut. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York issued joint releases that meticulously identified each of their 60 earmarks exactly as they appeared in the defense bill. Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, on the other hand, reworded a lot of his earmarks, often combining them and offering little explanation.

I also sent out scores of e-mails and made dozens of calls to military bases asking them to identify the recipients of earmarks. Though the bases initially seemed willing to help, they almost uniformly told me they either couldn't track the earmark or that a vendor hadn't been chosen yet.

Burlingame and Merritt devoted about four months to helping me gather this data. We succeeded in tracking more than 40 percent of the earmarks to a specific member of Congress and a recipient of the money.