The Washington Post: Steny Hoyer, a Member’s Member, Leads the Effort to Get More Benefits to Lawmakers

Wanted to be sure you saw this Washington Post article published this morning on House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer's (MD) work to bring the power of the purse back to directly-elected lawmakers by restoring Community Project Funding. To read the article click here or see below.

Washington Post

Steny Hoyer, a Member’s Member, Leads the Effort to Get More Benefits to Lawmakers

By Paul Kane, March 19, 2022

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer is not afraid to say out loud what many lawmakers think privately: Members of Congress deserve better benefits.

The Maryland Democrat believes that lawmakers should get a boost in salary after 13 straight years of no pay hikes. He’d like to give everyone a per diem for their days spent in Washington. He’s championed more funding to pay staff.

And, after more than a decade of pushing and prodding, sometimes in a lonely crusade, Hoyer helped resurrect earmarks, those small line-item projects that individual lawmakers can steer toward their district. “Embrace it,” Hoyer shouted in an interview, explaining what he tells lawmakers when it comes to delivering for their district. “Say, look, this is what we invested in!”

While leaders on the House Appropriations Committee did the detailed work in restarting the process — creating public databases for transparency and capping the number of projects each member could receive — Hoyer has served for a dozen years as the lead earmark evangelist.

It’s easier for him than most lawmakers. He’s been in Congress for 41 years, the longest-serving Democrat in the House. He has regularly won reelection by more than 30 percentage points. In addition, with a district that is just outside Washington’s Beltway, Hoyer’s constituents see the federal government as a lifeline to their careers, not as pork-barrel waste.

That gives him the freedom to touch what has become a political third rail for most members of Congress, demanding lawmakers get more power and money.

Earmarks fell out fashion after a string of corruption scandals led to federal convictions of four members of Congress, along with several executive branch figures and many K Street lobbyists.

Lawmakers last gave themselves a cost-of-living adjustment in 2009, freezing their pay at $174,000 at a time when prices have skyrocketed in the District of Columbia. More than a decade ago Congress slashed funding for their individual accounts to pay staff by about 20 percent.

Did voters appreciate all these self-imposed punishments? Not at all.

In February 2009, 31 percent of Americans approved of Congress’s performance, according to the Gallup poll, which tracks voter attitudes toward Congress every month. Thirteen years later, just 20 percent approved of Congress’s performance.

Hoyer isn’t surprised. Banning earmarks, in particular, left lawmakers without any direct connection to their constituents, most of whom tune out the daily partisan sniping on Capitol Hill and just want their congressmen to deliver for them. “It diminished member’s relationships with their districts,” he said. “To that extent, the public sort of shrugged their shoulders: What the hell can you do for me, Hoyer?”

Once the 2010 tea party wave swept Washington, bringing in a new generation of conservatives who promised to shrink government spending, President Barack Obama agreed with the GOP majority that earmarks should be banished.

Lawmakers left most project funding decisions in the hands of federal bureaucrats. Some senior lawmakers still wrote letters to federal agencies to try to steer money to their districts, and the most powerful members overseeing the Pentagon’s budget found creative ways to fund projects similar to the old earmark process.

Hoyer rose through the ranks as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, winning chits as he helped secure funding for other lawmakers. Back in 2009, six of the nine top leaders in Congress had served on the House or Senate appropriations committees, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Once earmarks were banned, Hoyer began his long effort, tilting at a political windmill. He held dozens of meetings or calls with GOP leaders and sent them letters, pleading to restart the process. And when he was back home, he always touted what he delivered.

In May 2015, at an event promoting the state-federal work in a nature preservation along the Potomac River, Hoyer boasted to the local officials that he started the process with an earmark. “This project is an example of how to use it for the public good,” he said.

The biggest hurdle was overcoming the corruption stench. The most notorious case came in 2005 when then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) was caught steering tens of millions of dollars to defense contractors in exchange for millions of dollars in personal gifts, including a boat and the purchase of his home at an inflated price.

Hoyer blamed the specific individuals involved, not the earmark process itself. “It’s because some guy was a crook,” he said. “It could’ve been some bureaucrat down there giving them the bridge or something.”

Even after Democrats won the House majority in the 2018 midterms, earmarks remained in limbo. “A number of people” in Democratic leadership, Hoyer said, remained “very reticent” about restarting them.

They feared that if one of the new majority’s first actions was to launch earmarks, Republicans would criticize them for being corrupt and supporting wasteful spending. Also, with so many new members taking office in recent wave elections, most lawmakers had no idea what they were missing out on.

Less than 30 percent of the 432 current members of the House served when Congress last had earmarks. Hoyer kept up with his earmark sermons, testifying before two House committees in the last Congress and talking to junior lawmakers about the benefits of earmarks. He also dedicated time to private huddles with a swath of Republicans, which convinced him that they were ready to abandon their prior pledge.

“I guarantee you, Republicans are going to ask for earmarks,” Hoyer recalled telling Democratic leaders.

Finally, when Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) campaigned in 2020 to become the new chair of the Appropriations Committee, she promised to bring back earmarks.

She won the gavel, and early last year she worked with Rep. Kay Granger (Texas), her GOP counterpart, and the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee to form a new system.

Members could only fund projects to local governments and nonprofits, like schools and hospitals. Each member was limited to 10 requests, made publicly available on their websites. The total funding was capped at 1 percent of the roughly $1.5 trillion in federal agency budgets, and DeLauro coined a new term: community project funding.

Sure enough, House Republicans jumped on board. By early this year, 108 House Republicans, a slim majority, requested about 700 projects. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who came into office on the 2010 anti-spending wave, now believes earmarks are a great thing. “We are giving taxpayers the best return on their investment,” Kelly said in a news release touting the eight projects he got funded as part of the massive agency budget bill approved March 9. Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), no. 2 and no. 3 in GOP leadership, also received millions in earmarks.

Hoyer believes that next year more Republicans will request these community projects and that, whenever the GOP reclaims the majority, this practice will continue.

His next project is reinstating the pay raise for members, something that he thinks they can sell if they’re just honest with voters. “We don’t level with people,” he said. “Do you think the average guy who’s working says, ‘I want to be paid the same thing this year that I was paid 13 years ago?’ Are you kidding me?”

At 82, Hoyer is ready to go after another third-rail issue. “Damn right! Listen,” he said. “I filed for office, I’m running!"