Against the porkbusters: conservatives should find another crusade.

ON May 1, President Bush vetoed the emergency defense-funding bill that the Democratic Congress had passed. It was the second veto of his presidency. He listed three reasons for the veto. The bill "would mandate a rigid and artificial deadline for American troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq." It "would impose impossible conditions on our commanders in combat." And it "is loaded with billions of dollars in non-emergency spending that has nothing to do with fighting the war on terror."

By making that last point, Bush was echoing the concerns of congressional Republicans. He was also demonstrating that the campaign against pork-barrel spending has risen near the top of conservative causes, with potentially dangerous consequences.

Very little of the disputed spending in the bill qualifies as pork: It's not money "earmarked" for a specific project, such as a highway ramp in a particular place, at the behest of a congressman. Most of the $20 billion in non-defense spending concerns matters of policy: Congressional Democrats want more money spent on the children's health-insurance program than President Bush does, for example. But as the defense bill moved through Congress, Republicans rallied opposition by mocking pork. They said the Democrats were short-changing the troops while lavishing money on spinach growers, salmon fishers, and peanut farmers. The Heritage Foundation's memorandum on the bill was titled, "Congress Hijacks Troop Funding for Pork."

In March, 154 House Republicans--more than enough to sustain a veto--sent Bush a letter complaining about the "extraneous and excessive non-security related spending" in the bill: "If you choose to veto this measure over this spending, we will vote to sustain your veto."

What the congressmen were saying was that even if the Democrats acceded to Bush's demands and passed a bill to fund the troops with no strings attached, they would still support a veto because of the wasteful spending. Or to put it more bluntly: For these Republicans, fighting pork was more important than fighting the war.

A second veto based solely on pork would harm both our troops and the foreign policy they are carrying out. It would also be politically perilous. Having spent months complaining that the Democrats were making our troops wait for needed resources because of their political agenda, Republicans would be doing the exact same thing. If Democrats' passionate feelings about the war cannot justify withholding those resources, how can Republicans' passionate feelings about subsidies for salmon fisheries?

Cooler heads are likely to prevail. After the veto, Democratic congressional leaders started to back down on their foreign-policy demands. But the party's left wing, which thought the demands were too tepid from the start, will vote against a bill that retreats from them. So the Democrats will need some Republicans to vote for the defense bill in order to enact it, and to get them they will have to scale back the pork. That process has already started: Criticism forced the Democrats to abandon the peanut farmers and spinach growers before they passed the bill.

But the fact that so many Republicans have been willing to entertain the idea of such a veto--and some Republican leaders are still eager for a veto showdown--suggests crusaders against pork have lost all perspective. A certain lack of perspective may, indeed, be central to their campaign, which places an enormous amount of political energy in the service of trivial goals.

IMMOVABLE LIMITS

The "porkbusters," as some of them call themselves, face three immovable limits. The first limit is that the reforms they are pushing hardest won't do much to cut pork. The leading reform is transparency: The porkbusters want the public to be able to find out which legislator put which spending item in a bill. But most earmarks are not secret. Politicians brag about them. Citizens Against Government Waste, one of the oldest anti-pork organizations, complains on its website that pork "conditions voters to re-elect incumbents based on their ability to 'bring home the bacon.'" Exactly. If reformers really wanted to cut down on earmarks, they would outlaw disclosure: If politicians could not take credit for bringing federal money to their districts, they would bring a lot less.

More disclosure, on the other hand, could increase the number of earmarks. Congressmen send "request letters" to the appropriations committees seeking funding for their pet projects. From time to time, it has been suggested that these letters be made public. If they were, the congressmen would end up going to bat for every constituent who asked them for help.

The second limit is that, most of the time, getting rid of earmarks saves taxpayers no money. A lot of people who cheer on the porkbusters are under the impression that cutting a dollar of earmarks will yield a dollar of budget savings. In most cases, however, "earmarks" are congressional directives that federal agencies spend some of their allotted money in a specified way. If the money isn't earmarked, the agency is free to spend it as it sees fit. Federal spending stays at exactly the same level. Those porkbusters who understand this point have, alas, not gone out of their way to dispel popular confusion.

The defense-spending bill is a rare exception to the rule. The pork in that bill really would increase the federal budget. That's because the bill is an emergency bill outside the normal budget rules. If a congressman puts in a bit of agriculture spending to benefit the voters in his district, he frees up money in the regular agriculture-spending bill to be spent on something else. President Bush has said that he is willing to consider some of the nondefense spending in the bill, so long as it is resubmitted in a regular spending bill.

Getting rid of earmarks usually means that the executive branch, rather than Congress, will determine in detail how federal money is spent. Porkbusters claim that earmarks are conducive to corruption. Republican congressman Duke Cunningham, who took bribes in return for earmarks that benefited his bribers and went to jail for it, is Exhibit A. Some reformers have a touching faith in the integrity of the "competitive, merit-based" grants system at federal agencies, and perhaps it works just as well as advertised. How well would it work if people who wanted federal favors could no longer get them from Congress? The executive branch is not immune to corruption. David Safavian's corruption conviction in the Abramoff scandal is entirely the result of his work in the executive branch.

The third limit on how much the porkbusters can achieve is that earmarks are a small part of the federal budget. Citizens Against Government Waste estimates that in 2006 pork projects cost $29 billion. That's serious money, of course. But it's also only 1.1 percent of the $2.7 trillion that the federal government spent in total. Most of the porkbusters are conservatives who want to reduce federal spending and eliminate unnecessary programs. Earmarks are a small part of that problem.

ASKING FOR MORE

The best anti-porkers concede this point, but argue that earmarks indirectly boost federal spending in a number of ways. Republican senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says that some congressmen vote for bloated spending bills because they contain earmarks for their districts: "The game ... encouraged everyone to be asking for money and everyone to be voting for bills that were bigger than the budget that had been voted for earlier." Federal agencies, he adds, ask Congress for more money than they need, because they know that Congress will direct them to spend some of that money in ways they don't want.

It is certainly true, as DeMint says, that earmarks can buy support for government-expanding bills. But they can buy support for government-shrinking bills, too. The Clinton administration spread pork around liberally to secure congressional votes for the North American Free Trade Agreement, and most fiscal conservatives are glad it did. If earmarks have more often been used to grease the skids for statist legislation, it is not because of the nature of earmarks themselves; it's because of the overall orientation of Washington, D.C., over the last century.

One House Republican aide points to former congressman Pat Toomey as an example of the positive relationship between earmarks and federal spending. If he wanted to fight big spending bills, he had to resign himself to getting no earmarks from the House Appropriations Committee. That is an excellent reason for a principled conservative congressman to shun the "favor factory" that the committee has been called. But it is not the case that shutting down the factory, even if it could be done, would make many congressmen into Pat Toomeys.

It could, perhaps, be argued that by highlighting silly projects that congressmen have promoted for base reasons, the porkbusters are delegitimizing federal spending in general and thus making it easier to shrink the government. But that strategy would be dishonest. And it would probably not work: Three decades of inveighing against "waste, fraud, and abuse" in federal spending, and pretending that eliminating those evils would lighten our tax burden, have not brought federal spending down.

The campaign against earmarks could even have the perverse effect of making other federal spending seem benign. If conservative porkbusters persuade taxpayers that the federal government could afford to provide free health care for all if only it stopped wasting money, they will have done themselves no favors.

In February 2006, Congress enacted a budget that slowed the growth of entitlement spending by $40 billion over five years. That is far more savings than the anti-porkers are ever likely to achieve. It was a tough vote for Republicans to take. By and large, fiscal conservatives did not applaud them for doing it. They did not pay the matter a fraction of the attention they have given to pork. They certainly did nothing to encourage congressmen to get into the habit of reining in entitlements.

Citizens Against Government Waste, on its website, makes another argument against pork. "Earmarks add to the national debt by acting as the gateway drug to Congress's spending addiction. Pork-barrel spending allows politicians to target benefits to specific groups at taxpayers' expense. That vote-buying mentality spills over into other areas of the budget, like entitlements, leading to higher overall spending."

In the late, decadent phase of the Republican Congress, you could see something like this at work. Congressmen had decided to get reelected by spending money on their districts rather than advancing conservative reforms. But let's not confuse cause and effect. The appetite for conservative reform died first, and then congressmen relied on incumbency and pork for their reelection in the absence of a reformist agenda.

The porkbusters might be able to do some very modest good. But hostility to earmarks has become a much larger cause for conservatives than it ought to be. If conservatives succeed in rooting out earmarks, their victory will mostly be symbolic. And to adapt Flannery O'Connor: If it's just symbolism, then to hell with it.