To understand the impact of earmarks you first have to understand research and its importance to the University.
UNL receives somewhat more than $100 million a year in external research funding. Most of this is from the Federal government, and most of it is in the form of competitive research grants.
To get a grant, first I submit a research proposal, which may be 100 pages long with 25 pages of closely printed, tersely worded prose in the scientific section. That proposal is reviewed and rated by a group of my scientific peers. If it scores very highly — and these days, oftentimes you have to be in the top 10 percent — they fund the proposal and UNL gets maybe a million dollars to pay for my research, plus about 50 percent extra in ‘indirect costs.’ The million dollars may purchase research equipment, or it may pay graduate student assistantships or buy supplies.
Research is sometimes denigrated, usually by people who don’t know any better. In fact, a vigorous effort on campus research is very good for undergraduate students. It gives them the chance to really get involved in the progress of science or other scholarship and not just learn about it in class.
It gives them the chance to use state-of-the-art equipment instead of hand-me-down or dumbed-down teaching stuff. It keeps the current faculty up to date, and it lets us attract new faculty who are among the smartest in the country. It’s what distinguishes a Research I campus like UNL from, say, UNO.
A small fraction of our funding, however, comes from earmarks. There, the process is different. UNL comes up with a research idea, often one that hasn’t successfully competed for a real grant, and pitches it to a congressman’s or senator’s staff. After a winnowing process that is more politics than science, the project is listed as a short item in the Senate-House conference report for an appropriations bill.
This tells, say, the Department of Defense that some millions of dollars in the appropriation are ‘earmarked’ for a particular research contract with the University of Nebraska. Full disclosure: thanks to Senator Nelson and Congressman Fortenberry, a major part of my research is currently funded by such an earmark, to study terrorist explosive detection.
I happen to think this was money well spent; in fact, as I write this, I’m returning from a press conference the American Chemical Society put on in Salt Lake City to showcase our project as one of the most exciting research developments of the year. But I would rather we had been able to get the funding by regular means.
This year, the omnibus appropriations bill that keeps the government running for the second half of the fiscal year contains over 8000 earmarks, some of which are destined for Nebraska. The two politicians I’ve named took very different stances on the final passage of this bill. Nelson inserted earmarks and has defended them; he voted for the final bill. Fortenberry also inserted earmarks but criticized the final bill and voted against it. While I think both gentlemen have defensible positions, let me explain why I think Fortenberry is right.
Nelson argues, in defense of earmarks, that they are a way for small states to level the playing field and combat biases in the system that send big states more than their fair share of federal largesse. And he’s right about the bias.
In 20 years of reviewing grants, I’ve seen that bias in action over and over again. I’ve seen proposals from east coast private universities with almost no research plan, but just a number of eminent curriculum vitae stapled together, with the not-too-subtle message “we’re great, send us money.” And they got the money. One of my own research mentors crudely described the United States as a “nothing sandwich,” with all the science on the coasts and nothing in the middle.
I don’t want to exaggerate. For the most part, peer-review works well and good science gets funded, but there’s no doubt a proposal from UNL needs to be substantially better than a proposal from Harvard to have the same chance of being funded.
Where Nelson goes wrong is in his assertion that earmarks help level the playing field. In practice they don’t. Nebraska, it turns out, finished in the bottom five of states in earmark dollars in the latest appropriations bill, and if you look at who got the loot, it was mostly the usual suspects – California, New York, Pennsylvania, etc. This wasn’t Nelson’s fault: His worst enemy would have to admit he works as hard as anyone to bring money to this state. (Unfortunately, last year our other senator was more interested in seeing himself on Sunday talk shows than on delivering for Nebraska.)
There are a couple of small states, like West Virginia and Alaska, that have historically done well from earmarks, because they have, or have had, pork-hound senators with decades of seniority. But by and large, the states that get earmark money are the states that get regular research money. In a system of proportionate voting, small states will always tend to have considerably less than their proportionate share of influence.
Congressman Fortenberry, in contrast, was accused of hypocrisy for inserting earmarks and then voting against the bill. In my opinion, however, his was not just a logical and ethical position, but the correct position. If you dislike the whole system, you should try to end it completely, not piecemeal.
Refusing to submit your own requests won’t end earmarks, it will just make sure other states get more than their share of pork, and yours gets less. Jeff has a duty both to his constituents and to the nation; he did his duty to Nebraska by working to direct earmarks here; he did his duty to the nation by voting against all earmarks.
If they want to help research in Nebraska, Nelson and Fortenberry should both pressure the agencies that dole out research dollars to lessen the bias and cronyism that favor established investigators, big pricey private schools and high-population states.
Nebraska doesn’t need to be a beneficiary of welfare or affirmative action; it needs a fair shake. Let our researchers compete on an even footing, and we’ll do just fine.
Earmarks put science at the mercy of politics, and take us out of the competitive pool in which we really need to sink or swim. Let’s put an end to them.
Dr. Gerard Harbison is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
I doubt, though, that the members of Congress would go for this, simply because pork-barrel helps to get them re-elected.