Military didn't want $588 million submarine
 
The biggest single earmark in the defense bill was $588 million to "accelerate" buying a new submarine made by General Dynamics, which builds submarines in Groton, Conn.
 
The military never asked for the project, and the Bush administration asked that it be stripped from the bill.
 
After the earmark was added, the Office of Management and Budget complained in a statement: "This funding is unnecessary and takes resources away from more urgent defense needs."
 
It stayed in.
 
Although they don't list themselves as sponsors of the submarine earmark, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Jack Reed of Rhode Island did take credit for the new submarine program in news releases back home, highlighting their work to bring jobs to the region.
 
"The funding for a second submarine has been an extended battle for Connecticut, and today we declare victory," Lieberman said.
 
According to Congress, this spending was not an earmark. Its reform bill is full of loopholes that allow lawmakers to insert favors and not have to disclose them as earmarks.
 
For example, a Senate report describes situations in which no individual senator championed a request but instead it somehow arose through group consensus. In those cases, the add-on was not considered an earmark but a "committee initiative."
 
Under the reforms, Congress uses a semantic maneuver to conceal earmarks. {fini}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The common definition of an earmark is money that somebody gets from Congress because they cannot get it from a federal agency. Congress uses a far narrower definition: an earmark has to be "primarily at the request of a member," targeted to a specific company or location, with no competitive bidding.
 
 
A pet project in Pennsylvania reveals how Congress tries to hide earmarks using the semantic loopholes.
 
Latrobe Specialty Steel of Latrobe, 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, makes specialty steel for aircraft parts.
 
In 2006, its parent company, Timken, spent $2.9 million lobbying Congress on various issues and persuaded lawmakers to ban the Defense Department from buying any products using foreign-made specialty steel. As the sole U.S. producer of certain kinds of specialty steel, Latrobe saw its orders climb. Timken then sold Latrobe to a group of investors in a $250 million deal.
 
But the buy-American restrictions for specialty steel caused serious problems for the Air Force, creating a 17-month lag in getting spare parts for aircraft used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
In May 2007, Latrobe said it needed to expand but complained of high electric bills and publicly threatened to build a new plant in Virginia or West Virginia instead. Pennsylvania offered grants and tax credits to the company worth $1.2 million.
 
In Congress, lawmakers were quietly lining up a much sweeter package.
 
In the defense bill passed in December, someone had inserted language that ultimately directed $18.4 million for "domestic expansion of essential vacuum induction melting furnace capacity and vacuum arc remelting furnace capacity."
 
"Latrobe Specialty Steel is the only domestic producer of that steel," Army Lt. Gen. William Mortensen said at a hearing.
 
A month after the bill passed, Latrobe began a $62 million expansion in its home state.
 
No one in Congress has admitted sponsoring the Latrobe earmark.
 
One congressman's fingerprints, however, weren't so easy to conceal. Latrobe sits in the congressional district of Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat who chairs the subcommittee that drafts the defense bill and wields the most power over defense earmarks.
 
Latrobe's officials have given $5,000 to Murtha's re-election fund in the past two years.
 
Also, Murtha had talked about giving taxpayer dollars to Latrobe. "We're trying to get together to see how we can work out an increased capacity for that particular company," Murtha said at a subcommittee hearing in April 2007. "I've talked to that producer. And what I'd like to see is them put some money in, us put some money in, and reduce the time it takes to get those spare parts out."
 
This spring, the Air Force carried out the earmark by asking companies to submit proposals for a $16.6 million research grant that would expand production of specialty steel made through "vacuum induction melting and vacuum arc remelting."
 
The money was aimed at alleviating the shortage of specialty steel.
 
But the foreign-steel ban proved so restrictive that the military and major defense contractors, such as Boeing, complained that they couldn't get parts. In December, Congress loosened the ban.
 
Latrobe has tentatively won the research grant, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed, although details are still being worked out.
 
The company would not comment on any discussions it had with Murtha. A spokeswoman defended getting the grant, saying it had been competitively bid. Even so, she acknowledged that Latrobe is the sole U.S. producer of certain specialty steels, a requirement for getting the money.
 
She said Latrobe was a few months away from completing the $62 million expansion while it waits for the government handout.
 
Through a spokesman, Murtha said the project was not an earmark because the contract was competitively bid. Last year at a hearing, however, Murtha talked of giving Latrobe funding because it was the only U.S. company that could make that steel.
 
Lobbyists get pork
 
At first, the Senate seemed gung-ho about eliminating the secrecy surrounding earmarks. Last year, senators voted 96-2 to force themselves to reveal the names of those getting earmarks. But leadership stripped that rule out before the bill's final passage.
 
So this year, for example, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., listed 28 earmarks. A typical entry reads: "Mobile Objects for Net-Centric Operations, $2.4 million." No company or names are listed.
 
She disclosed far more before the widely publicized reforms, through news releases that identified who received the favors.
 
Cantwell's office would not explain why the senator no longer identifies companies that benefit from her earmarks.
 
The House has stricter rules, requiring members to sign letters naming the intended recipient of their earmark. But in 110 cases, lawmakers didn't follow the rules.
 
Some House members merely said their favors went to the Department of Defense or a military branch or unit.
 
For example, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, said a $1.6 million earmark he co-sponsored would go to the "Office of Naval Research." Yet other co-sponsors tagged the money for Global Delta, a young company created by two longtime lobbyists.
 
John Albertine and his brother James, past president of the American League of Lobbyists, have knocked on lawmakers' doors seeking earmarks on behalf of clients. In 2003, they formed Global Delta and decided to get an earmark for themselves. Several months later, they succeeded. With no background in engineering, the two lobbyists landed a $4.1 million contract with the Office of Naval Research to study and develop advanced, cost-effective radars.
 
Soon after getting the contract in June 2004, John Albertine hired a couple of engineers to do research. Meanwhile, he and his brother continued to operate Albertine Enterprises, their lobbying firm.
 
Over the past five years, Global Delta officials have donated $35,000 to Conaway and others who sponsored its earmarks.
 
Conaway's office said he was unavailable for comment.
 
The company snagged a defense earmark in 2006 for $3 million and another in 2007 for $1 million.
 
John Albertine said he asked for $4 million in 2008 but landed only $1.6 million.
 
Global Delta turned down the earmark because it wasn't enough funding, he said. They opted to search for private funding so they could own the intellectual property rights to some of the research, he said.
 
Their concept was to build a low-cost radar system to track ships. A prototype was never built, Albertine said.
 
"Whatever they can
 
get away with"
 
Other than a little embarrassment, there's no cost to lawmakers for failing to disclose earmarks.
 
In past reforms, Congress imposed criminal penalties for filing false disclosure forms on personal finances or gifts. Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, for example, is standing trial on charges he failed to disclose at least $250,000 in gifts from a wealthy supporter who got earmarks.
 
Last year, as public cries for reform grew louder, Congress enacted civil and criminal penalties for lobbyists who failed to detail their activities on federal disclosure forms. Yet lawmakers included no penalties for themselves if they failed to disclose earmarks.
 
If Congress were serious about reform, it would close the loopholes, said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
 
"An awful lot of members of Congress would much prefer to have business as usual and they are going to do whatever they can get away with," said Norm Ornstein, a political scientist at American Enterprise Institute.
 
"Clearly what this suggests," he said of The Times' findings, "is that we need another wave of reform."
 
A new administration could bring that. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., vows to veto any bills with earmarks, arguing that pork-barrel spending is not only wasteful but leads to corruption.
 
"We Republicans came to power to change government, and government changed us," McCain said during the first presidential debate.
 
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., pledges he'd scrutinize earmarks more closely as president, eliminating those that are wasteful.
 
But Congress shows no inclination to give up on earmarking and has shot down recent reform efforts. In March, both McCain and Obama voted for a one-year moratorium on earmarks, but the measure failed in the Senate, 71-29.
 
After first avoiding the issue, President Bush in the past two years has talked tough about curbing earmarks. This year he ordered federal agencies to ignore any earmarks buried in "conference reports" — obscure, fine-print attachments — rather than written into the clear language of a bill.
 
In response, Congress wrote language into the bills that in essence told federal agencies they had to honor the earmarks buried in the conference reports.

I'll bet there are a thousand stories like this. Not shocking at all.
 
Anybody here from Ohio....?
 
Something similar there, not that far back. A company out there that makes acertain air firce jet was contracted to make just ONE more,,, and the airforce said,, they had no place for it in their air force.
 
Can't recall teh cost, it was in teh $hundred of millions,,, and the senator (Glenn, maybe??) that pushed it through claimed he did this to help keep the company from laying off people.
 
So there ya GO!
 
Y'all can have your leg cut off and you won't get medical care because they did not budget for it.
 
Y'all still think it's just me???
 
 
BTW, HoM, It would be nice on interesting when you have threads of general interest if you had a link.