THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408040543
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By Frank Greve, Knight-Ridder News Service
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines
John Murtha, who is not a rich man, gave his alam mater nearly $100 million last year.
His secret: The money was yours.
Murtha, an 11-term western Pennsylvania Democratic congressman, quietly slipped his gifts into the huge defense appropriations bill passed by the powerful House subcommittee he chairs.
``Academic pork'' is the name of his game, and it has become a popular pastime in Congress.
A decade ago, fewer than a dozen universities were bold enough to ask key lawmakers to earmark grants exclusively for them. Now hundreds do it. The cost to taxpayers has soared from $11 million in 1982 to more than $650 million this year.
Some of the ways that money is spent are raising eyebrows - like a planetarium for a Michigan community college that has no astronomers, and money for a Chicago gear research institute already under criminal investigation for possible misuse of past federal grants.
Congress also is backing diabetes research by a scientist who never has heard of the National Institutes of Health unit that leads the field, and is sponsoring Chesapeake Bay studies by a new Pennsylvania environmental center 180 miles from its shores.
Sometimes it's hard to know just what America's political philanthropists are up to. Leon Haley, top spokesman for the University of Pittsburgh, Murtha's alma mater, says he knows ``almost nothing'' about how the $99,600,000 in grants to the school included in the 1994 appropriation are being spent.
``Nobody knew what the hell to do with it,'' recalls Lawrence Korb, a former top Pentagon official whose advice was sought by a friend, the university's president, when Murtha first offered the money.
Most of the money actually is going to Concurrent Technologies Corp., a subsidiary of the University of Pittsburgh Trust. Both are nonprofit corporations used to fund academic research by faculty members and others.
According to a CTC brochure, its research is focused on metalworking, manufacturing software and anti-pollution systems. CTC is based in Johnstown, Pa., Murtha's hometown, 80 miles east of the university's main campus.
Generous senior House and Senate Appropriations Committee members like Murtha are behind the successes of the universities and states that have won the most academic pork since 1980.
Pennsylvania is far out in front with an estimated $377,238,000, followed by Massachusetts with $206,191,000. Others in the top 10 are Oregon, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Michigan, California, Iowa and West Virginia, in that order.
The congressional handouts - called earmarks - are specific spending orders by Congress's most powerful figures. They involve outlays not called for in the president's budget and generally made without debate on the merits of the spending.
Pennsylvania dominates the earmark game because Joseph McDade of Scranton, another Pennsylvanian enthusiastic about academic pork, is the ranking Republican on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee that Murtha chairs. Together, they can steer just about anything through the House.
Overall, $651 million in earmarks to campuses slipped into 1994 congressional spending despite a long and ardent campaign against them by Rep. George E. Brown Jr., D-Calif., and other reformers. The total is down from $763 million in 1993, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Brown and tighter spending limits get credit for most of the cuts.
And the House Appropriations Committee's new chairman, David Obey, D-Wis., a reformer, has slashed the discretionary spending accounts of subcommittee chairs and is scouring academic earmarks from 1995 appropriations bills.
But Obey is facing mounting pressure to preserve the pork from some House leaders and Rules Committee members and from Senate counterparts.
The problem, congressional aides say, is that earmarks for education have a righteous ring. ``People think `education: good, pork: bad,' and average it to say `academic pork: well . . . OK,' '' grouses a staffer who has studied the problem. And voters are two-faced, he adds. ``They want to cut pork but they still expect their member (of Congress) to bring home the bacon.''
Washington lobbyist Ken Schlossberg - who recently helped Wake Forest University in North Carolina win a huge new nutrition center rejected as redundant by the bill-paying Agriculture Department - takes a more populist view.
``The earmarking process is another form of competition,'' Schlossberg contends. Its goal: to extend federal help to needy schools and up-and-comers nationwide, as well as to outstanding research institutions.
Thousands of state and community colleges nationwide - and lawmakers representing them - agree wholeheartedly with Schlossberg.
But Congress's flexible responses sometimes appears to produce questionable spending.
Why, for example, is NASA spending $8.75 million on a planetarium for Michigan's Delta College, a two-year institution without an astronomy department? One answer: retired Rep. Bob Traxler lives six miles away in Bay City. Traxler chaired the appropriations subcommittee that controlled NASA's money.
Despite calls against such outlays, resistance in Congress remains weak.
Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the Defense Appropriations subcommittee's ranking Republican, thinks he knows why. ``Almost every member of the Senate . things in their state,'' Stevens said in debate on the 1994 Defense bill. ILLUSTRATION: VIRGINIA'S MEAGER SHARE
Virginia was a big loser in the funding game. The state, with
only $15.1 million appropriated for academic earmark grants from
1980 through 1994, ranked 45th among the 50 states and the District
of Columbia.
North Carolina did somewhat better, pulling in $39 million and
ranking 34th.
KRT Graphic
ACADEMIC PORK
Sources: Library of Congress, Chronicle of Higher Education
For copy of graphic, see microfilm
KEYWORDS: U.S. CONGRESS EDUCATION FUNDING
by CNB