When I served as the managing editor of National Journal's Technology Daily, I spotted an apparent trend in federal spending -- more money going toward tech-related pork projects.
A time-intensive search of keywords in several editions of the annual "Pig Book" produced by Citizens Against Government Waste confirmed my suspicions. There were only a handful of tech-related earmarks in the mid-1990s, but the numbers started climbing in fiscal 1999 and soared in subsequent years.
That initial investigative research ultimately led to a series of stories in 2004 about Congress' newfound obsession with tech pork -- everything from "business incubators" and data-sharing systems to technologies for law enforcement and schools. Oh, and don't forget the $16,000 that Uncle Sam spent for interactive displays at the National Distance Running Hall of Fame, which is sponsored by an entity now partially owned by the taxpayers, General Motors.
Five years later, lawmakers haven't whetted their appetite for tech-related pork. The proof is in the 76-page list of proposed earmarks for fiscal 2010 recently released by the House Appropriations Committee, which The Club For Growth highlighted on their blog.
The list is chock-full of tech goodies for major metropolitan areas and small villages alike, as well as for large universities and small colleges.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., requested $750,000 for technology to identify the location of gunfire in San Francisco, while Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., wants $5,000 for Internet safety programs in the village of Downer Grove. Iowa State University would get $1.8 million for a forensic testing lab and for the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment, a virtual battlefield facility used to train experts against cyber attacks. And $300,000 would go to Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pa., for a campus-wide security system.
Here are other examples that show how lawmakers in both parties want to spend taxpayers' hard-earned money for the latest gadgetry:
- $1.03 million for a biometric enhancement education project in Pontiac, Mich;
- $1 million to Glendale, Ariz., to implement computer-aided dispatch;
- $750,000 to two Indian tribes in Oklahoma for visual intelligence;
- $500,000 for advanced photovoltaics array testing at the University of Toledo;
- and $300,000 for a California seafloor mapping program.
Pork-barrel critics are quick to ridicule easy targets like the "bridge to nowhere" and the "highway to nowhere." But high-tech projects masked by obscure industry jargon like "biometric enhancement," "visual intelligence" and " advanced photovoltaics" have been getting a pass because of the wow factor. If it's high-tech, the thinking seems to go, it has to be good.
That may be true to an extent. It's hard to argue in theory with projects like coastal tidal gauges to warn people in places like Mobile County, Ala., about potentially deadly storms. Every parent can appreciate the mission of organizations like Enough Is Enough, whose Internet Safety 101 program is designed to protect children from online sexual exploitation.
But that doesn't mean those projects should get more than $1 million in federal money combined (as proposed in the earmarks list) without facing diligent budgetary scrutiny.
Pork-barrel spending is bad not just because lawmakers repeatedly fund outrageous projects. The process is the problem. High-tech pork is just as likely to foster corruption as any low-tech project because of the backroom dealing involved.
Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif., went to jail for bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion. The charges stemmed in part from his advocacy for a defense contractor whose company wanted to build a $20 million document digitization system the Pentagon didn't want. The pending corruption charges against Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., also have a tech connection -- Jefferson's alleged advocacy for the telecommunications firm iGate in exchange for money.
Both Cunningham and Jefferson were masters of the earmark game. Jefferson even secured funding for projects in Louisiana after being voted out of office last year.
High-tech earmarks arguably have a greater potential for fostering corruption than bridges and highways to nowhere because even pork critics may become enthralled with lawmakers' plans to fund cool government toys. The $900,000 that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., requested for Golden West College may not sound so bad when people realize its for an interactive simulator to train police in a realistic 3-D environment.
Of course, even some high-tech projects raise eyebrows on the surface. What significant value would the country gain from spending $350,000 for miniature antennas on unmanned aerial vehicles or $700,000 on night-vision binoculars for one sheriff's office? Does the federal government really have an interest in investing $500,000 for remote sensing and science-based management of invasive species in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge?
And what about the tens of millions of dollars for systems to help emergency responders communicate across jurisdictions? Lawmakers have funded dozens of those projects since the 2001 terrorist attacks without any proof that the return on the investment of, say, $495,000 in the small township of Weathersfield, Ohio, justifies the expense.
It's also easy for lawmakers to disguise potentially worthless high-tech projects behind generic terms like "information sharing," "family court technology improvements" and "innovative STEM education" (that's short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
High-tech pork is still pork, and it's only going to become a bigger share of the earmarks pie as the information age matures. Budgetary watchdogs, "Porkbusters" and tea partiers need to start casting a bright and critical light on it in this era of gizmo government.
K. Daniel Glover's Bio
K. Daniel Glover has worked as an editor, writer and new media specialist in the Washington area since 1991, spending most of that time at National Journal and Congressional Quarterly. Glover is currently a project manager at Accuracy In Media and last year served as the executive producer of the conservative video-sharing site Eyeblast.tv. He blogs at The Enlightened Redneck .
Posted
06-11-2009 12:05 AM
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