Obama faces bill riddled with earmarks

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.

“We need earmark reform,” Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. “And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”

President Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that’s riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.

The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.

So while Obama and McCain were slamming earmarks on the campaign trail, House and Senate members — Democrats and Republicans — were slapping them into spending bills.

“It will be a little embarrassing for the president if he signs a bill with that many earmarks on it,” said Stan Collender, a veteran Washington budget analyst. “He’ll say they’re left over from the Bush years, and he has to say that next year the bill will be clean.”

Experts agree most earmarks are legitimate. Cary Leahey, senior economist with Decision Economics in New York, said the nation’s economic crisis is a contributing factor to the plethora of earmarks. Lawmakers can argue that for a relatively small price, they’ve helped boost the economy.

“One congressman’s earmark is another legislative way to fix a serious problem in his district,” Leahey said.

Kenneth Thomas, a lecturer in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, agrees.

“I generally believe that the priority is getting money into the system sooner rather than later, especially if it’s for projects that will use local contractors and create jobs,” he said.