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Young scolds the White House budget director
Compiled from Times wires WASHINGTON -- Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Largo Republican who leads the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has sent the White House budget chief a little lesson in congressional authority. As with most members of Congress, Young over the years has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Tampa Bay area for road work, military facilities, university projects and other public works. Now the White House, and particularly President Bush's budget director Mitchell Daniels, is taking aim at thousands of local projects. Lawmakers call the practice "earmarking"; critics call it pork barrelling. In a letter to Daniels, Young wrote that lawmakers will continue the practice and cited the constitutional requirement that Congress must approve federal spending. "Unless the Constitution is amended, Congress will continue to exercise its discretion over federal funds and will earmark those funds for purposes we deem appropriate," Young wrote. Young's staff released the letter in an unusual public airing of a spat between the Republican White House and a lawmaker of the same party. In the letter, Young also cited the knowledge of their districts that House and Senate members have. "All wisdom on the allocation of federal grant funding does not reside in the executive branch," the letter said. "Members know the needs of their districts better than civil servants working in Washington, D.C." The brusquely written letter reflected an age-old rivalry between the two branches of government. It also underlined the rancorous relationship that has developed between Daniels, an aggressive advocate of spending cuts, and members of the appropriations panel, who write spending bills covering one-third of the $2.1-trillion federal budget. Asked about the letter, White House budget office spokeswoman Amy Call said, "We look forward to working with Congress." House GOP leaders declined to criticize Young, aware that, particularly in an election year, such projects are popular with lawmakers. "There are some fights we don't need to get in the middle of," said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. The 2003 budget that Bush sent Congress on Monday had repeated disparaging references to lawmakers' home district projects and proposed eliminating more than 1,000. The budget book, for which Daniels is responsible, says such projects have hindered everything from efforts to protect overfished waters to public works construction projects. Showing little partisan preference, the documents criticized a biomass research project in Winona, Miss., home state of Senate Republican leader Trent Lott. The budget also proposed including 1,612 health and education projects among a list of items from which lawmakers were asked to make enough cuts to save $1.3-billion. The money is needed to avoid cuts in Pell Grants to lower-income students, the administration said. Young wrote that his committee would make sure the Pell program gets the money it needs. He said the suggested cuts in those projects "fall well short of a serious proposal." That proposal also drew fire last week from Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the Appropriations Committee's top Democrat. Earmarked projects have grown in number and cost in recent years. In last year's budget, Bush proposed cutting enough projects to save $8-billion. Lawmakers ignored it. The White House budget office says 7,803 such projects were in the regular spending bills Congress passed last fall, compared with 6,454 the year before. -- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
