WASHINGTON — 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.
