U.S. Senator Criticizes Colleges That Ignore His Request for Details on Earmarks
By Jeffrey Brainard
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 13, 2006
Thirty-nine colleges have failed to provide details about their Congressional earmarks and lobbying efforts to a U.S. senator who requested that information from more than 100 institutions last month. Sixty institutions have complied with the request, and 10 have sought more time to respond to the senator, who has criticized the set-asides as "pork politics."
The senator, Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, "won't rest until he gets responses" from the 39, his spokesman, John G. Hart, said on Tuesday.
Earmarks are controversial noncompetitive funds secured by members of Congress for favored constituents. Senator Coburn, who leads a subcommittee on federal financial management, plans to hold hearings specifically about academic earmarks and call college officials as witnesses, and he has not ruled out seeking subpoenas, Mr. Hart said. The senator posted a list of the nonrespondents on a Congressional Web site.
In August the senator wrote the institutions asking them to describe the earmarks they received, their policies on earmarks, and lobbyists they paid to help secure them (The Chronicle, August 8.) Senator Coburn, who is a medical doctor, has called earmarks "the gateway drug to overspending." He has contended that many such projects, whose number has soared in recent years, lack justification. He has also suggested that colleges and other recipients face pressure to hire lobbyists with insider connections in Congress to secure earmarks in annual appropriations bills.
In a written statement, Dr. Coburn said of the nonrespondents, "It is indefensible for institutions of higher learning to demand more and more money from the public through tuition and tax dollars while keeping the public in the dark about how they spend public funds. The least a college or university can do that has benefited from thousands or millions of dollars in earmarked funds is to provide the public a clear accounting of how those funds were used."
He added, "In the long term, higher-education earmarking may seriously erode our nation's research edge and ability to compete in a global economy by putting politics ahead of sound science."
One of the nonrespondents, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, plans to provide the requested information this week, said Van D. Romero, its vice president for research and development. "We're a small school," and so couldn't respond more quickly, he said.
Senator Coburn's request posed a sticky challenge for colleges: On the one hand, earmarks are a sensitive topic within academe because they circumvent the open competitions that federal agencies typically use to assure quality when giving money to academe. But many colleges have a strong appetite for the pork -- they often defend earmarks as a useful complement to competitively awarded federal grants, especially for research areas that have been neglected by federal agencies.
The universities that did respond provided varying levels of detail. On the whole, Senator Coburn was satisfied, Mr. Hart said, although he may ask some institutions for additional information.
Some universities that did respond, like Syracuse University, seemed reluctant to play ball. In its response, Syracuse suggested that the senator seek more information from the institutions' state Congressional delegations. The university agreed with Senator Coburn "that both academic institutions and members of Congress must exercise care and judgment in selecting projects that are deserving of federal financial support," wrote Ben R. Ware, vice president for research.
In other responses, university officials offered more extended justifications and descriptions of their earmarks. The University of Arizona pointed out that its yearly allotment of earmarked funds is only 7 percent of the amount it received in competitively awarded federal research funds for 2004-5: nearly $260-million.
Institutions also said that they had established internal procedures to vet the quality of proposed projects before asking members of Congress for earmarks to finance them.
Ambivalence about earmarks was expressed by some elite research institutions that admitted accepting them in exceptional cases, despite the institutions' policies against seeking them. Duke University said it got a single earmark in the past six years, $1-million in 2001 for a project to improve preventive care for patients with congestive heart failure. (Duke reported receiving $451-million in total federal merit-based research funds in 2005.)
Duke offered an explanation often repeated by officials at other institutions about their earmarks: that the idea for the $1-million earmark came from a member of Congress, in this case because of a discussion between the legislator and the chancellor of the university's medical center. "University officials neither requested nor advocated for this funding," wrote John F. Burness, Duke's senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. He said the project improved patients' health, lowered costs, and was now offered as a benefit to the university's employees.
Missing no opportunity to win support in Congress, some of the respondents invited Senator Coburn to back academic research generally because of the benefits that scientific discovery offers for the country's economy and welfare. Lee T. Todd Jr., president of the University of Kentucky, wrote that he would put the senator on the mailing list for the university's Odyssey magazine, which highlights "our successful researchers."
The senator's letter caused "perplexity and curiosity" among many college officials, said Becky Timmons, director of government relations at the American Council on Education. "I don't know that even now our campuses have a good sense of what the point is" of the letter, she said, or "what the information will be used for, or why it was being sought."
Senator Coburn's letter and the responses are part of a yearlong drumbeat of debate about earmarks and lobbying on Capitol Hill. Republican Congressional leaders -- stung by low poll ratings as the November election approaches -- appear determined to make some policy changes to show that they can effectively respond to recent scandals over lobbying and earmarks, like the conviction of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Leaders of Congressional appropriations committees have said that they have already slashed the number of earmarks in proposed appropriations measures for the 2007 fiscal year, which begins October 1, compared with this year's level.
In addition, both the House of Representatives and the Senate were considering proposals this week that would require that the Congressional sponsors of all earmarks be identified in all reports accompanying annual appropriations bills. Critics of the earmarking process say it is currently too secretive. But others say more disclosure won't necessarily reduce the practice.
Senator Coburn wants even more details about earmarks disclosed: He has co-sponsored a bill, which the Senate passed last week, to set up a searchable public database providing the names of recipients and other information for all federal earmarks, grants, and contracts. Many recipients of earmarks are not identified by appropriations reports, especially those for the Defense Department. (The bill, S 2590, is titled the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.)
The House of Representatives could pass a version of the bill as early as today.
