Congress : Federal Pork-Barrel Practice Gets Fitted for a Leaner Look : Earmarking, which bypasses routine review to distribute money to academic institutions, is trimmed nearly in half.

Capitol Hill lawmakers have curtailed one of the more popular pork-barrel methods of distributing federal money to academic institutions after a decade in which such practices rose sharply, according to a House committee’s findings.

The controversial practice known as earmarking dropped this fiscal year to nearly half the 1993 level in five leading appropriation bills, according to a review by the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Under earmarking procedures, members of Congress add funding requests for favorite projects--often for universities and colleges in their home districts--to appropriation bills in a way that bypasses routine congressional review.

Earmarks come in all shapes and sizes, including many for non-academic purposes. But the House committee, led by Chairman George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), has targeted academic earmarks specifically because they seem to have spun out of control--costing $750 million in fiscal 1993.

Brown attributes the decline in earmarks to publicity and criticism directed at the practice earlier this year by the committee’s investigation and public hearings on the subject.

“Earmarking circumvents the system we have in place which allocates funding based on national needs and competitive merit review,” Brown said in the committee hearings. “Earmarking places the priority setting and the funding process in the hands of a few individual institutions with powerful congressional allies or lobbyists.”

While there is considerable support in Congress for Brown’s position, earmarking is not without defenders. Those who favor the practice argue that it enables smaller states and academic institutions to compete for and obtain federal funds that too often go to elite institutions with reputations that work in their favor in the traditional budget process.

At a hearing this year, academic officials defended earmarking as a sound method of funding important national projects.

“We are able to raise from private sources only a tiny fraction of the amounts coming to most leading research universities, such as Johns Hopkins and Harvard,” said Dr. Charles McCallum, president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “We have taken advantage of those opportunities that have been available to us.” Others have noted that the relationship of jobs and local economies to the funds for scientific and technological research pressures members of Congress to bring home academic funds.

Most of the academic money at issue comes from five leading appropriation bills: defense; agriculture; veterans affairs and housing and urban development; energy and water; and commerce, justice and state. In those five measures, earmarked funds fell from $557 million in fiscal 1992 and $659 million in fiscal 1993 to $371 million in the current fiscal year.

Under routine congressional procedures, funds in those bills are appropriated after lengthy hearings and deliberations. But higher-ranking members of appropriation committees are able to circumvent the process at the conclusion of deliberations by acting on their own to insert language into the “report” that accompanies the legislation to the federal agency involved.

Those reports are intended to guide the agencies through the bill, and the language is not binding. But agencies follow the instructions rather than risk alienating powerful members of Congress.

Brown has taken his campaign to the White House, where he has tried to win the support of Vice President Al Gore.

In a recent letter, Brown urged Gore, who has spoken out against earmarking in his plan to “reinvent government,” to put his weight behind an executive order that would eliminate earmark projects by requiring executive agencies to disregard earmarked funds that appear in the report language accompanying legislation.

“I do not question the goals of most earmarked projects but rather the method by which the funds are awarded,” he said in his letter.