Earmark:
In the United States, the term earmark is used in relation with the congressional allocation process. Discretionary spending, which is set by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and their various subcommittees, usually through appropriation acts, is an optional part of fiscal policy which differs from mandatory spending for entitlement programs in the federal budget….
Earmarks where banned in 2011 by Congress during the Obama Admin….
The America government has never had a audit of how much it spends for Defense and where….
The last US Budget outlay for the Pentagon is $674 Billion….
Earmarks NEVER really went away….
President Donald Trump suggested earlier this year that a return of earmarks, which were often used in horsetrading for votes, might be beneficial.
Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, has suggested he would aim to bring back earmarks if his party takes control of the House next year. The senior Democrat on Senate Appropriations, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, has also supported a comeback for the practice. Republican leaders are less vocal right now, but many of them also support a return to earmarks.
“I don’t doubt that the next organizing conference for the next Congress will probably wrestle with this issue,” outgoing House Speaker Paul D. Ryan told reporters earlier this month.
Account quietly amasses funds
The Defense Rapid Innovation Fund was launched in 2010 (first as the Rapid Innovation Program) in the fiscal 2011 defense authorization law. It was a way to capture what proponents called the innovative spirit of programs called earmarks that were clearly about to be banned.
Unlike earmarks, the defense fund’s money would be competitively awarded by the Pentagon, not directed by Congress, supporters of the idea pointed out.
Democrat Norm Dicks, then a senior Defense appropriator, and other advocates of the program described it at the time as a way to capture the innovation among smaller companies, including many who had received earmarks…..
Talk about a total waste of money.
I have long favored massive cuts in the military (not “defense” because if you look at how this money is often spent it has nothing to do with “defense”) spending.
Still do.
Not that it will happen.
In fact the Pentagon budget is more of a political spending and less of a straight defense policy ….
They don’t regularly audit the department…
The assets and therefore expedites are spread out so as to make sure every state gets a piece of the pie
I have also called for a critical look at their spending…..
The throwing money haphazardly at defense is a waste of how much we have no idea
That while Republican seek to cut social safety net programs…
While there’s a Base Relocation & Closure Commission (BRAC) to study the relative utility or necessity of different sites in different states and cities, there’s no such process to study which individual defense contracts and programs are most helping the military’s mission, safety or welfare.
Nor, of course, is there any measure of the opportunity costs of giving up some scientific, educational, diplomatic or humanitarian program in order to fund platforms that help (parts of) individual Congressional districts far more than they help the armed services (such as some aircraft that no armed service wants, but Congress does).
I remember the base fiasco
In the end ?
I believe none of the lawmakers could bring themselves to agree to take cuts of bases in THEIR states?