A NOTE ON EARMARKS.

A NOTE ON EARMARKS. I got a chance to ask a friend who’s a career federal civil servant about earmarks. He told me that earmarks are frequently obscure even for the agency spending the money. The earmarks arrive in a four or five word mention in a conference report, and then his agency has to go about finding out the very specific project that the brief mention referred to. If the Committee files don’t have the answer and the project is not related to the agency’s mission, it can be difficult to locate the intended project. He chuckled that recently the fiscal year had ended and one recipient called up to ask what had happened to its money. The agency had not found out what the project was but only that it was from a Congressman in Ohio. I pressed him on earmarks. He estimated that perhaps half of the earmarks for his agency had nothing to do with the mission of the agency, although that didn’t necessarily mean they were bad projects.