Democratic leaders have agreed on a spending bill which contains No earmarks.Details Here. One detail involves the Army Corps of Engineers…
By declaring a one-time moratorium on earmarks, the Democratic leaders
are granting the Bush administration more leeway in spending. The Army
Corps of Engineers construction budget, for instance, typically
outlines funding for specific projects. But under the no-earmarks
pledge, Obey and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) decided that Congress cannot spell out spending, so they
opted to give a lump sum of $2.3 billion to the Army Corps — about $38
million less than it received in 2006 — and to allow the agency to
decide which projects deserve the money.
This will be an interesting year. ACE has been a pork barrel favorite of Congress for years. So no earmarks on the one hand is good news in that it gets their grubby hands away from projects.
On the other hand though is Bush. Not good.
This sounds like it could be a huge favor to Bush, and potentially to New Orleans. If he could just let the bureaucrats at the ACE pick the best places to spend the money, and tell his patronage buddies at the top to just keep their chairs warm, it might just get spent sensibly. The ACE seems to have come a fair distance from when I was a kid, when their main function seemed to be to do things that were actually destructive (cross-Florida barge canal; lots of swamp filling and river straightening).
I have this fear:
There is the surface action and rationale. But there is also a subsurface chess game to guide public opinion for the 2008 election. Appear to be bipartisan. Give Shrub enough rope and see if he will hang himself.
This is a dangerous game.