If there’s one thing most Democrats and Republicans can agree on, it’s that Congress has become an ineffectual disaster, frozen in partisan conflict and seemingly unable to pass any meaningful legislation. One of the few instances of efficient lawmaking that members have managed this year happened only after flight delays caused by budget cuts began to threaten their own vacation plans.
American politics, it seems, has become so polarized that lawmakers simply can’t find common ground on the most important issues of the day. And a chorus of thinkers from the world of political science is making a surprising argument about how to overcome the gridlock: Restore something that has long been considered a symbol of all that is wrong with government — pork-barrel politics.
Pork, in this context, refers to federal money that has been earmarked by lawmakers to fund projects in their home districts: things like roads, bridges and museums. The past 21/2 years have been unusual in American history in that Congress has been operating almost entirely without such earmarks, thanks to a pork ban passed in the Senate and the House. Though driven primarily by conservatives concerned with fiscal responsibility, the move was ultimately applauded on the left and the right, and hailed as a victory against wasteful government spending and corruption on Capitol Hill.
But people who have thought hard about earmarks, and researched their history, say that in demonizing pork, Congress accidentally gave up something deeply valuable: a tool for reaching compromise.
Earmarks, they point out, can be used by party leaders as bait to persuade — or simply bribe — lawmakers to support legislation and join coalitions they might otherwise spurn. “If a member of Congress can bring something home that’s really valued in their district, that’s powerful,” said Diana Evans, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and author of the book Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress. “It’s something they can claim credit for.”
The use of pork to ease the passage of controversial legislation dates to the beginning of the republic, when one of the very first American laws ever passed, the Lighthouses Act of 1789, made it to George Washington’s desk only after party leaders promised a group of reluctant Southern representatives they’d fund the construction of a new lighthouse in Virginia in exchange for their cooperation.
While that may sound to us like a perversion of the democratic process — a system that rewards self-interested politicians bent on winning elections — those who believe in the power of pork argue that it’s a necessary part of a functioning democracy. Pork has historically cost taxpayers a relatively small amount of money, less than half of 1 percent of all federal spending, they point out, and it has helped innumerable laws get passed in return.
So far, the pro-earmarks argument has not gotten much of a hearing outside academic circles. But as Washington stalemates persist, it might be time to admit that a Congress without pork is useless, even if it feels a little less greasy.
Projects funded through earmarks, by definition, aren’t vetted by any federal agency in the same way as the vast majority of federal spending. Instead, they get paid for when party leaders tuck them into appropriations bills, either to do someone a favor or help a vulnerable politician win re-election. Over the years, this kind of ad hoc spending has become a powerful symbol of everything ordinary people hate about politics.
For a politician to stand up against pork, then, is to come out against a culture of waste and corruption — a winning move, especially in an atmosphere of anti-government sentiment. “Earmarks go against people’s sense of fairness,” said Scott Frisch, a professor at California State University Channel Islands and the co-author of a recent book on pork-barrel spending.
But according to Frisch and other proponents of earmarks, to treat pork as if it’s synonymous with waste misses its practical role in making Congress work. In their 2011 book, Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks Are Good for American Democracy, Frisch and co-author Sean Kelly mount a spirited, two-pronged defense of pork. For one thing, they argue, most of the projects that get funded through earmarks — shelters for abused women, job training programs, research centers, transportation — aren’t all that frivolous and are earnestly conceived by politicians in response to real needs in their communities. Even more important, however, these projects serve as highly effective bargaining chips when ambitious, controversial legislation is on the line.
Diana Evans makes the same argument in 2004’s Greasing the Wheels: “Pork barreling,” she writes, “despite its much maligned status, gets things done.” In 1998, a major highway bill was passed thanks to earmarks; as a lobbyist told National Journal at the time, “The projects are the glue that’s going to hold the damn thing together.”
The current ban on earmarks was spearheaded by House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans who wanted to send a message about the importance of cutting down on government spending, but it ultimately won support on both sides of the aisle. So far there has been no sign that the ban — which was initially billed as temporary — will be lifted anytime soon.
But it’s becoming clear that this anti-spending gesture has its own costs.
“What we’re seeing is a natural experiment where we say, ‘Let’s try to run Congress without earmarks for a few years.’ And what we’re finding out is that we don’t really like what’s going on,” said Jeffrey Lazarus, a political scientist at Georgia State University who has published multiple academic papers on pork-barrel politics. Once a skeptic of the pro-earmarks argument, Lazarus said recently that he has mostly changed his mind in the midst of today’s gridlock.
“Certainly, that’s not the only thing preventing Congress from passing big pieces of legislation and getting other things done,” he said. “But it certainly can’t be helping.”
There are still reasons to be skeptical about the idea of bringing back pork. On a practical level, Congress might simply be too polarized at this point for earmarks to work the way they used to. Many representatives today were elected almost entirely based on their opposition to federal spending, which makes them unlikely to be swayed by the prospect of new government-funded bike paths in their hometowns.
There’s also a moral objection, stemming from the fact that earmarks don’t just enable back-scratching among lawmakers — they also can enable corruption, allowing lobbyists to secure federal funding for clients by encouraging politicians to seek earmarks in exchange for campaign donations. This practice was rampant before the ban went into effect, said Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig.
Lessig said he understands that earmarks were a useful tool for coalition-building. But “if we go back to earmarks,” Lessig said, “you’ll just see that corruption manifest itself through the economy of earmarks again.”
But perhaps the most important reason the pro-earmarks argument is hard to swallow is that it violates our ideals about American government. Ultimately, its lesson is a cynical one: Without crude, institutionalized bribery, our democracy simply doesn’t work.
Still, it might be worth accepting that slightly bleak view if it would buy us a Congress that actually functions again — and manages to move the country forward.
“This whole idea that legislators should be above selling their vote, and should vote with their conscience all the time — it’s this idealized vision of human nature that doesn’t really reflect actual human nature,” Frisch said. “People think it’s dirty, but it’s also how you end up with the Civil Rights Act.”
Leon Neyfakh is a staff writer for The Boston Globe, where a longer version of this essay first appeared. His email address is firstname.lastname@example.org.