Funds for Education Are Raided by Congress

At a time when improving America’s schools is a government priority, Congress has increasingly been raiding the money set aside for education reform to pay for pet projects, records and interviews show.

In the current federal budget, lawmakers have dipped into national education money to finance perks for their home districts, honor retired colleagues and help well-connected constituents.

Congress “went hog wild” bestowing such benefits, said Scott Fleming, the U.S. Department of Education liaison to Capitol Hill.

In huge departments such as Defense, Transportation and Energy, larding budgets with home-district projects is such a time-honored custom that it has spawned a proverb on Capitol Hill: “You call it pork, but I call it infrastructure.”

But carving slices off the education budget is a recent phenomenon, according to congressional staffers and education experts.

They said the new trend is troubling because there is so little to slice from--more than 90% of the department’s $33.1-billion annual budget is tied up in mandatory spending or money funneled to the states by formula. That leaves less than $3 billion in discretionary funds each year for innovation, reform, research and investment--and for lawmakers to finance their special projects as well.

“It shows a disregard for the competitive process, and it shows a disregard for really addressing the issues in education,” said University of Michigan historian Maris Vinovskis, who has worked in the Education Department.

Lawmakers dispensed tens of millions of dollars in education grants that were slipped into the budget process this year without hearings. This below-the-radar spending received even less scrutiny than usual because Congress ran out of time this year to debate and vote on separate spending bills. Instead, legislators lumped the entire 1999 federal budget into one hurriedly considered measure.

Education funding was a major element in the autumn budget wrangle and key to the eventual accord between a Republican-led Congress and a Democratic administration. Congress grudgingly gave in to President Clinton’s demand to spend $1.1 billion to reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers.

At the same time, Congress rejected a nearly $1-billion school-construction plan as a responsibility of local districts and states, not the federal government.

Except in Iowa, that is. Sen. Tom Harkin, well situated as the senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, inserted $10 million in federal money for “public school facilities repair and construction” in his home state.

Big Names Get the Big Dollars

Here are some items, large and small, that Congress subsidized with scant education funds:

* A total of $10 million for three university centers named for senators who left office in 1996: the Robert J. Dole Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence; the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, which previously had hired the former Illinois senator at $120,000 a year; and Portland State University’s Oregon Institute of Public Service and Constitutional Studies--at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government.

* Another $10 million to operate a National Constitution Center being built in downtown Philadelphia--in the home state of Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Appropriations education subcommittee.

* Transcription of 1,200 oral-history interviews about labor and unions in Iowa--again a Harkin request at a cost of $300,000.

* A $50,000 donation for a CD-ROM to “enliven the Constitution” by a lab in West Virginia, the state represented by Sen. Robert C. Byrd, ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on education, labor and health, raised concerns about whether such spending on local projects is the best use of federal education funds.

“The question is whether it’s a fair process and responsive to needs,” Porter said. “This is a national legislature, and we should be focusing on national needs.”

Yet even Porter, a member of Congress’ Porkbusters Coalition, succumbed to temptation this year. He tossed $250,000 to Chicago’s Loyola University for urban research and $1.5 million to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to help repair a Nazi submarine.

“It’s a national education site,” Porter said, defending the museum expenditure while visibly struggling to suppress a smile.

Major targets for lawmakers seeking to finance local projects are the Fund for Improvement in Education and the Fund for Involvement in Post-Secondary Education, accounts intended to give the Education secretary flexibility in stimulating new ideas.

About 15% of the $275-million School Improvement Programs account goes to specially targeted interests. One example: While a recent Education Department study reported that American students are badly deficient in drawing, playing music and arts appreciation, the entire $10.5-million Arts in Education budget is devoted to two beneficiaries specified by Congress: the Kennedy Center in Washington and Very Special Arts, an organization for the disabled founded by Jean Kennedy Smith.

Also, in a program to upgrade school technology, Congress set aside $19.6 million for a dozen specific grants in Iowa, Alaska, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Montana--leaving the other 43 states to compete for $9.85 million.

Congress approved $25 million in “national leadership projects” for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a related agency newly carved out of the Education Department. Lawmakers doled out $21 million for their favorite projects, leaving only $4 million for the competitive grants the agency was created to dispense.

Critics say that education spending on special projects entered a new dimension, where access to the right lawmaker counts more than merit or need.

In the realm of special requests, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) got the 21,000 residents of Bay Shore, N.Y., $700,000 for literacy education and a drug-free lifestyles program at a local wellness center--about one-half the $1.41 million in special projects set aside for all of California.

California, the nation’s largest state, received less than 10% of the $21.3 million that Harkin snagged for Iowa, his state. Iowa’s funding for special projects nearly equals the amount currently devoted to professional training for teachers nationwide.

How did this happen? It was rivalry between the House and Senate over the practice of “earmarking” funds, specifying in writing what they are to be used for.

“The Senate earmarks all over the place,” Porter said. “We’re not going to allow one body to do all the earmarks.” In other words: They got theirs; we want ours.

“The problem,” said another House staff member, “is that we don’t know very much about any of these projects. It’s kind of scary.”

Indeed, a few recipients of congressional largess--sometimes over departmental objections--have faced accusations of mismanagement and wrongdoing.

One example: $21.9 million in federal funds for a fine arts center at Bethune-Cookman College, a Daytona Beach, Fla., school with 2,300 students. Congress continued to ladle out money every year through 1998--six years after two men leading the project started serving prison time for bank fraud connected with the building.

The Education Department noted that Bethune-Cookman was eligible to apply for an existing construction loan-guarantee fund for historically black colleges and should compete with other proposals. There was no need, the department wrote in its 1996 budget request, to reserve extra federal money. But the school received $3.7 million that year, $1.4 million the next and $6.6 million for 1998.

Byrd Gets Money for Scholarships

Last-minute additions to the Education Department budget were previously restricted by Rep. Bill Natcher (D-Ky.), who held the job Porter has today, until his 1994 death. Porter recalled Byrd begging Natcher in a late-night meeting to include a scholarship program the senator had named after himself--to no avail.

Eventually, Byrd discovered that, even with Natcher, a pet program could get in if it had been authorized by the congressional committees that set education policy. (The Byrd honors scholarships got $39.2 million this year.)

Another example is the Native Hawaiian Education Programs, which give extra money for special education and higher education in the 50th state. The Education Department itself has called these programs “unnecessary and duplicative.” The Office of Management and Budget and Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government project have also suggested eliminating them.

This year, even Porter’s House committee tried to end them by pointedly allocating no money.

But the programs survived, thanks to Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), said one congressional staffer. In 1996, Inouye personally visited the Education Department, which resulted in a quiet retraction of its criticism. And this year, Inouye’s efforts paid off with $20 million--$2 million more than the administration requested.

This brings Hawaii almost $500 for 1999 in extra federal money for each of the 46,000 school-age Native Hawaiians.

Times researchers Tricia Ford and John Beckham and librarian Robin Cochran contributed to this story.