Washington, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) today spoke on the Senate floor in support of preserving the ban on congressional earmarks. The speech comes one day after Flake sent a letter urging President Donald Trump to make it clear that he will veto any bill containing congressional earmarks. Such a veto threat would likely bring an end ongoing efforts in the House to bring back the wasteful and corrupt practice of congressional earmarking. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) also signed the letter to Trump.

“Should earmarks return, I intend to challenge each one of them here on the Senate floor. Just as I did throughout my time in the House, I will file amendments to force debate and votes on earmarks. That way, members can publicly defend their earmarks to the hardworking taxpayers they represent. As we look toward the future, I have been encouraged by the president’s recognition of Washington’s addiction to spending, and his administration’s commitment to finally do something about it. I look forward to working with the administration to make the federal government leaner, more transparent, and more accountable to the taxpayers it serves,” said Flake.  

View a signed copy of the letter to Trump here.
Video of Flake’s remarks can be viewed here.
A transcript of the prepared remarks can be viewed below. 

Background:

• On Feb. 3, 2017, Roll Call reported that the House Rules Committee plans to hold a series of hearings about rolling back the congressional earmark ban. To read the article, click here.
  
  
• On Jan. 10, 2017, the Senate Republican conference voted to approve Flake’s amendment to extend the chamber’s moratorium on earmarking into the 115th Congress. For more information on Flake’s successful amendment, click here.
  
  
• In June 2015, Flake responded to calls for a return to the practice of congressional earmarking by releasing Jurassic Pork, a report highlighting the continued cost of pork projects in the post-earmark-ban era. The report, along with Flake’s Jurassic Pork Act, helped lead to the elimination of long-term, unobligated transportation earmarks – also called orphan earmarks – in the 2016 omnibus. For more information on Flake’s Jurassic Pork report, click here.

• From 2003 to 2010, Flake highlighted an Egregious Earmark of the Week. The series concluded when Congress enacted the current self-imposed moratorium on congressional earmarks.

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Within a matter of days, our national debt will top $20 trillion, notching another ominous milestone in our nation’s long-running addiction to spending.

How did we get here?

A decade ago, taxpayers learned that many of their elected representatives were complicit in an insidious practice that rotted the legislative branch to its core: congressional earmarking. Called a “gateway drug” by our distinguished former colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Tom Coburn, earmarks have long exacerbated the federal government’s spending addiction.

As old as the republic, earmarks have always been used by generations of politicians as currency to curry favor with well-connected special interests. After public outrage reached a critical mass, both the House and Senate instituted bans on earmarks, ending what had been a corrupt, pay-to-play culture in Congress.

In order to preserve this important check against the corrupting influence of earmarks, I recently sent a letter to President Donald Trump respectfully urging him to veto any legislation containing earmarks that reaches his desk. I would like to thank my colleagues, Senators John McCain, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse, for co-signing this letter. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following letter be submitted for the record.

To explain the urgency behind my letter to the president, I would like to remind my colleagues in this body, many of whom were not in Congress before enactment of the moratorium, just how bad the earmarking epidemic had gotten. For the uninitiated, the term “earmark” is a euphemism for when lawmakers work to circumvent the normal appropriations process in order to secure special funding for projects in their home states or districts. This resulted in federal tax dollars being doled out by Members of Congress on a whim, bypassing normal rigors of federal and public vetting. 

Instead of focusing on oversight responsibilities or devising legislative solutions for the nation’s most pressing challenges, lawmakers and staffers devoted thousands of man-hours toward filing earmark requests. Congressional appropriations committees transformed into “favor factories,” abandoning oversight responsibilities to focus on rationing out pork. To me, this was one of the most infuriating aspects of congressional earmarks. Instead of poring over agency spending and searching for waste in our trillion dollar discretionary budget, Members and staff devoted countless hours to the roughly 2 or 3 percent of federal spending represented by earmarks.

Things quickly spiraled out of control.

In less than 20 years, the number of earmarks in the transportation bill alone grew from 152 to 6,300. That’s an increase of more than 4,000 percent.

Examples of earmarks ranged from: a quarter billion dollars for a bridge to nowhere in Alaska; $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa; and a half million dollars for a teapot museum in North Carolina. All of these earmarks added up, eventually totaling as much as $29 billion a year.

It was in this environment that, along with a small group of like-minded colleagues, I set out to put an end to this form of transactional politics that had infected the halls of Congress. Our mission was to place a permanent moratorium on congressional earmarks.

It took unprecedented revelations of widespread corruption and illegality, and ultimately the jailing of lawmakers, staffers, and lobbyists before the public’s outrage forced Congress to clean up its act. But even brazen instances of public corruption didn’t stop Congress from dragging its feet on reforms, and the majority party paid the price at the polls.

The dominant mood of the electorate at the time, that of mistrust in government institutions, is strikingly reminiscent of the “Drain the Swamp” mentality that permeated last November’s election. But despite this surging anti-insider sentiment across the ideological spectrum, there is now a chorus of lawmakers working behind the scenes to lift the congressional earmark moratorium.

These earmark defenders will trot out arguments ranging from “constitutional prerogative” to the insignificance of earmarks relative to the entire federal budget.

All of these defenses ring hollow.

The constitutional power of the purse is not a blanket mandate for Congress to spend freely. Rather, it is a fundamental duty to prevent the executive branch from wasting taxpayer dollars. By using earmarks to funnel billions of dollars to special interests, Congress ceases to be a check on the executive branch. We become no better than the free-spending bureaucrats we rail against.

While we were ultimately successful in securing earmark bans in both the House and Senate, today we are seeing far too many cracks in their foundations.

With so many in Congress now willing to sacrifice fiscal discipline, we must remain vigilant against a return to business as usual. We cannot afford to forfeit the hard-won progress we’ve made.

The Senate Republican Conference’s vote earlier this year to preserve the Senate earmark ban was an important step in the right direction, but we need to do more. That’s why I sent the letter to President Trump, and it’s why, should earmarks return, I intend to challenge each one of them here on the Senate floor. Just as I did throughout my time in the House, I will file amendments to force debate and votes on earmarks. That way, members can publicly defend their earmarks to the hardworking taxpayers they represent.

As we look toward the future, I have been encouraged by the president’s recognition of Washington’s addiction to spending, and his administration’s commitment to finally do something about it. I look forward to working with the administration to make the federal government leaner, more transparent, and more accountable to the taxpayers it serves.

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