It’s 12 meters across, encased in a protective dome, and located in the heart of a North Carolina forest. It’s a radio telescope at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute that was formerly part of a satellite tracking network but is now being converted into an educational facility. It’s also the recipient of a $1 million “grant” from NASA, the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times reported Tuesday.
What the article doesn’t say, at least explicitly, is that the money is from one of hundreds of earmarks attached to NASA’s FY2005 budget. (You can see it in NASA’s FY05 operating plan, on page 12 of the PDF document, under the “Space Science” section.) The newspaper article does note that Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) “was able to secure the federal funding” for the observatory, but doesn’t elaborate. Taylor and the observatory held a ceremony Monday to formally award the money, complete with a giant mock check “signed by the U.S. Taxpayer.”
As anyone who follows NASA’s budget over the years knows, “earmark” has become something of a dirty word within the agency, as members of Congress attach their pet projects to the consternation of agency officials struggling to get larger core projects funded. But to the staff and students at PARI and western North Carolina, this line in a budget document is a major project they have struggled for years to fund. (One wonders, though, that if this project is as useful scientifically and educationally as its backers claim, why they couldn’t win a grant through a peer-review process from NASA or NSF.) There’s no sign that Congress plans to let up on earmarks in this or future budgets; PARI’s backers must be particularly pleased that Rep. Taylor will serve on the new House Appropriations Committee subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA.
“Earmark” is a dirty word among all federal employees–unless, of course, it’s their program being earmarked! Look at the total budget for most agencies and departments, then subtract the earmarks, and you end up with remarkably little money available to be spent at the agency or department sees fit. But since Congress controls the purse, complaining about it only threatens future budgets.
This is one of the real downsides of democratic government.
John Burgess wrote:
“Look at the total budget for most agencies and departments, then subtract the earmarks, and you end up with remarkably little money available to be spent at the agency or department sees fit.”
This is not true. See:
http://www.house.gov/rules/98-518.pdf
“In practice, however, earmarks are generally defined more narrowly, often reflecting procedures established over time that may differ from one
appropriation bill to another. For one bill, an earmark may refer to a certain level of
specificity within an account. For other bills, an earmark may refer to funds set aside within an account.”
To add a little more, an “earmark” usually refers to a) money that was _not_ requested in the President’s budget, _and_ b) money that has almost nothing to do with the agency’s core missions. Usually both of these things have to be true. Congress can add or subtract money from a budget and also specify how money is spent. After all, that is one of Congress’s powers enumerated in the Constitution. It is when individual Congress members add lines in the budget requiring money for specific pet projects that the system goes awry. That usually happens when they earmark money for projects having nothing to do with the core missions (like funding a science or education center in their home state using NASA money). But it can also happen when they require that money be spent on a project or study that has not gone through the proper channels. For instance, there are established peer review procedures for getting certain projects into the President’s budget, but if Congress says “spend money on this” it can cause that system to collapse. There is at least one example of this in the NASA FY05 budget recently approved.
You can find a decent discussion of the NASA earmarks problem here, from an admittedly biased source:
http://www.taxpayer.net/TCS/wastebasket/space/2003-02-07.htm
An analysis is here:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/custom/space/orl-asecssbudget05020503feb05,1,7040067.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
All that said, I give the North Carolina people props for painting a smiley face on their radio dish.
Wow, two North Carolina posts in a row. For what it’s worth, this is really close to where I went to grade school (within 10-15 minutes), and we never went there. My little sister is in high school now and I saw that there was a summer program where high school kids can pay several thousand dollars to spend a month there. Obviously too much money for a girl interested in science to attend without her parents wanting to fork out a lot of money. I am not sure whether the will change with this grant though.
Charles Taylor is very good at bringing money back to his district.