Come Clean About Earmarks

U.S. Rep. David Davis has said he sees nothing wrong with federal earmarks as long as the process is “transparent.”

So why won’t he reveal his 2009 earmark requests? Is he hiding further evidence of his slavish devotion to moneyed special interests? We don’t know.

Davis was one of just 33 House members who refused to disclose their earmark requests for the upcoming budget to the nation’s premier pork-busting group, Citizens Against Government Waste. That’s down from 94 House members who refused disclosure in 2008.

It appears that openness is catching on in the halls of Congress. Davis is just a bit slow to get the message. Perhaps he believes in transparency for others only, not for himself.

Davis, a one-term incumbent, saw his reputation tarnished earlier this year when it was revealed that he scored a $4 million earmark for a private company that donated heavily to his campaign. That chunk of pork went to BAE Systems, the defense contractor that runs the Holston Army Ammunition plant in Kingsport.

Davis defended his actions, noting that the munitions plant provides jobs for many of his constituents. This explanation would have been more convincing if Davis hadn’t pocketed the company’s campaign donations around the same time he was pushing the earmark. Such an arrangement looks like a quid pro quo deal.

The BAE earmark wasn’t the only one that Davis secured in the 2008 budget. Along with an Ohio congressman, he obtained a $1 million earmark for another private corporation, Seaman, to make collapsible urethane storage tanks.

He also brought home another $4.5 million in federal funds for a variety of local projects, including construction of a children’s hospital at Johnson City Medical Center, renovation of a church-affiliated food pantry in Hancock and Hawkins counties and work on the East Tennessee State University College of Pharmacy. On their face, these worthwhile projects will serve the greater good, but because they were funded through earmarks, they were not subjected to congressional debate. There is no way to determine whether they were the highest-priority projects in the region, state or nation.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group, objects to all earmarks for philosophical reasons. The group describes its mission this way: “to eliminate waste, mismanagement and inefficiency in the federal government.” The group is non-partisan but hews to a fiscally conservative policy.

This isn’t a vast left-wing conspiracy aimed at Davis, as his supporters frequently suggest. Transparency, accountability and government efficiency are values to which all can subscribe.

In the interest of fairness, we note that U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., has yet to release a list of his 2009 earmarks. He hasn’t refused to do so; he simply hasn’t yet provided one. We trust that he will make his requests public in a timely fashion.

Boucher secured $2.7 million in earmarks in 2008 for a variety of public projects in the region, including an expansion of the University of Virginia telemedicine program (which allows medical specialists to consult on local cases without traveling to the region). None of his requests benefited private companies.

Boucher and Davis together earmarked $787,000 for the long-delayed Beaver Creek flood-control project in Bristol, but again this is a public project, not a private concern. So long as earmarks are the method of distributing money for public works projects, lawmakers will feel obligated to play along.

The pork-busters at Citizens Against Government Waste contend that earmarks should go the way of the dinosaur and that projects, like Bristol’s flood-control effort, should go through the regular appropriations process, which includes full congressional debate. This makes sense. As a first step to full accountability, lawmakers should come clean about their requests.

Returning to Davis, he pledged to do away with earmarks while on the campaign trail in 2006. Now, he merely contends that the process should be “transparent.”

Fine. Davis should make his actions match his rhetoric. He should release a list of his 2009 earmark requests. The voters have a right to know whose interests he is serving.