I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That Earmarks Are Going On In Here!

Earmarks — didn’t you think that they were all done with? I mean, the Republicans in Congress showily promised that this Congress would mark the End of Earmarks As We Know It.

Well, guess what is back? Earmarks! Now they’ve renamed them to Member Requests, )and created their own slush fund in order to fund these projects) but the teajadi freshmen who campaigned against earmarks and the so-called wasteful spending they represented have found a way to get their fair share of the pork:

The defense bill that just passed the House of Representatives includes a back-door fund that lets individual members of Congress funnel millions of dollars into projects of their choosing.
This can be done despite a congressional ban on these so-called “earmarks” — special, discretionary spending that has funded Congress’ pet projects back home for years, but now has fallen out of favor because of budget-conscious deficit hawks.
Under the cloak of a simple line item named the “Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund,” Congress has been squirreling away money that previously had not made it into appropriations bills — like $9 million for “future undersea capabilities development,” $19 million for “Navy ship preliminary design and feasibility studies,” and more than $30 million for a “corrosion prevention program.”

“Plus-ups”. The fig leaf here (besides the name change) is that they are adding funds to a line item, but it isn’t directed to a specific contractor since the work has to be competitively bid. Now these “plus-ups” are for DOD work — work that is already underway and they are *adding* funds to. If you know anything at all about the kind of contracts the DOD lets, you’ll know that if they are competitively bid, only one bidder will submit. If Lockheed Martin is manufacturing an item that got a “plus-up”, there won’t be a genuine bidding process to actually replace Lockheed. Or — if you have added a “plus-up” to acquire land, you are buying what is useful to the facility — you aren’t shopping all over town for real estate.

It is crazy and you know that they’ll campaign on the money that they sent back to their districts — which makes them earmarks. And you’d think that people trying to kill off Medicare and screaming about the debt and deficits would understand at least the symbolism on refraining from participating in the excess spending.

But you didn’t think that they really cared about spending, did you?