12/20/06 Earmarks in Question

Earmarks in Question. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Thousands of lawmakers' pet projects - known as earmarks - including some affecting agriculture - will get no funding under a move by Democrats to end work on unfinished spending bills. First - the Republicans punted to the new Congress when they couldn't finish nine of eleven appropriations bills. Now the Democrats are punting by simply extending old funding levels. Pat Wolff is the American Farm Bureau Federation's Budget Specialist. WOLFF: The Democrats have a choice; they can either spend the beginning of the next Congress trying to do what the Republicans didn't get done the year before or they could throw up their hands and say this is too big of a mess, we're just going to allow funding to continue at last years level for the entire fiscal year, that would be up until next October. Wolff says some of the projects or earmarks lost as a result of that decision - deal with agriculture. WOLFF: USDA's bill is full of dedicated funding. Funding that is directed one place or another to do research. Those programs will all be impacted. One example recently cited by the Washington Post is 1.5-million dollars in biotechnology grants for the Illinois Institute of Technology. But Wolff says earmarks won't completely disappear under Democratic leadership. They will - however - be fewer. WOLFF: Earmarks, if they continue, are going to be much easier to identify. It will be known who put the earmark in. And it's widely expected that while earmarks will continue there's not going to be near as many of them in the budget. Wolff says such grants will be awarded more competitively in the future - versus being targeted to specific projects. Meantime - Farm Bureau and other farm groups are still stewing over the loss of disaster aid on the failed Senate USDA bill...tape WOLFF: Congress' inability to pass a budget and get emergency money out to farmers and ranchers is critical. Farmers are hurting and they are in a critical situation and the fact that the government couldn't get their act together isn't helping at all. More than 88-percent of counties nationwide were declared drought disaster areas last year. Nearly 66-percent were designated this year. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.