WASHINGTON -- Ah, December. The season of spending -- and in Washington, the season for politicians to recount and criticize the spending by their fellow politicians earlier in the year.
On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Roswell took his turn, teaming up with fellow Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois to introduce what they called the 11 worst spending projects of the 111th Congress.
Among them: $1.9 million for a little-used water taxi to a desolate Connecticut community; $3.8 million for an urban artwork project in Rochester, N.Y.; and $380,350 for a program to encourage West Virginia landowners to grow ginseng and shiitake mushrooms.
"Truly [these] spending items… are eye-opening, and might be amusing, but they're symptomatic of a … disease here in Congress that will cripple the future prosperity of Americans," Price said.
The projects identified by Price and Kirk received taxpayer dollars through the Obama administration's economic stimulus program or through so-called "earmarks" that members of Congress can use to direct funding to parochial or "pork barrel" projects. Both Price and Kirk have sworn off the use of earmarks.
Neither Price nor Kirk mentioned earmarks by other lawmakers -- both Democrats and Republicans -- that benefited their own states, however. Other members of Congress from Georgia in either party earlier this year requested earmarks for projects such as a $330,000 renovation of a historic train car repair shop in Savannah; $200,000-plus to study ways to improve Georgia's blueberry production; and $178,000 to study a disease called phytophthora that affects cucumbers and squash.
Price, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee caucus, acknowledged that earmarks by members of either political party aren't hard to find, and that the projects he and Kirk singled out actually represent a relatively small amount of federal spending.
"Yes, they represent just a small portion of our annual spending, but they represent all that is wrong with the mind-set in Washington," Price said. "Spending drives all that we do here."
The Obama administration didn't let the criticism go unanswered.
White House spokeswoman Gannet Tseggai said, “The president has urged that Congress significantly reduce earmarks. The House and Senate have responded, with earmarks down by double-digit percentages in their appropriations bills. In addition, not a dime of Recovery Act funds is spent through earmarks -- every last dollar is distributed through established formulas or following a merit-based award process. The administration also implemented an unprecedented transparency and accountability effort with the Recovery Act to block bad projects from getting funds -- and that effort has been a huge success. Of the over 50,000 Recovery Act projects approved to date, just a handful have even been flagged as a potential concern, much less actually turned out to be one. The real question here is not whether Recovery Act funds are well-spent, but whether the critics will at long last acknowledge that well over 99 percent of the projects are sound, effective and working as promised.”
Earlier this week, Congress' most outspoken critic of wasteful government spending, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), teamed up with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to release a report detailing 100 projects funded by the Obama administration's $787 billion economic stimulus program that they said were wasteful, shortsighted and even silly.
Included in the senators' list was an $88,000 project to repave a stretch of Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard in Atlanta that had been repaved just two years earlier. That project was detailed in a September story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Other projects singled out in the McCain-Coburn report include $5 million to improve energy efficiency in a nearly empty mall in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; $4.7 million to Lockheed Martin Corp. to research a supersonic corporate jet; and $1.2 million for a museum in Lexington, Ky., designed to explore "Man's Relationship With the Horse."
On the Senate floor Thursday, McCain listed a litany of pork barrel projects he said were included in six Democrat-led bills now pending in Congress. Together, the earmarks for things such as a rural bus program in Hawaii, exhibits in a food expo center in Iowa and music programs at Carnegie Hall total more than $3.7 billion in wasteful spending, he said.
"It's just awful," McCain said. "Couldn't they use some of this $3.7 billion in earmarks to pay for some of the essential services that have to be cut back not only in my state but everywhere?"
Worst government spending projects of the year?
According to a list released by two Republican congressmen on Thursday, these are the 11 worst:
1. $1.9 million for a water taxi to Pleasure Beach, Conn.
2. $3.8 million for an urban art trail in Rochester, N.Y.
3. $3.1 million for upgrades to an 88-year-old canal boat museum in New York
4. $3 million for bicycle racks in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown area
5. $1.5 million for a streetscape project around a Detroit casino
6. $578,000 to fight homelessness in Union, N.Y., a town that reportedly has no homeless people
7. $550,000 for a skateboard park in Pawtucket, R.I.
8. $500,000 for fish food for Missouri fish farmers
9. $400,000 to renovate a vacant building in Jal, N.M.
10. $380,350 to encourage West Virginia landowners to grow ginseng and shiitake mushrooms
11. $90,000 for a shared kitchen for food service entrepreneurs
Source: Republican U.S. Reps. Tom Price of Roswell and Mark Kirk of Illinois
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