As Deficit Fight Looms, Obama Eyes Earmarks

(Nov. 13) -- Get ready to hear a lot more about earmarks, those generally unvetted and under-the-radar additions to spending bills used by members of Congress to bring federal dollars home to their constituents.

They were a target of both President Barack Obama and his opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, in the 2008 presidential election but remain an active legislative vehicle for federal spending. And even as Washington gears up for a new fight over how to cut the budget deficits built up over a decade of financial crisis, wars and significant tax cuts, Obama today is taking aim at earmarks as a key source of red ink.

"We can't afford 'Bridges to Nowhere' like the one that was planned a few years back in Alaska," Obama said today in his weekly radio address. "Earmarks like these represent a relatively small part of overall federal spending, but when it comes to signaling our commitment to fiscal responsibility, addressing them would have an important impact."

His assault on earmarks comes as the president winds up a 10-day trip to Asia focused mostly on economic issues and international disputes tied in part to an American fiscal policy that has been restrained by a federal deficit that reached $1.3 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September.

But Obama's address today seems more of a response to a midterm congressional election in which the burgeoning deficit played a resonating role and the rollout this week of a controversial deficit-cutting plan from the bipartisan commission he appointed to address the problem that offered painful cuts across the spectrum of federal spending.

Obama noted that the budget he submitted to Congress would freeze federal discretionary spending for three years, and that he's ready to "offer additional savings."

"But as we work to reform our budget, Congress should also put some skin in the game," the president added. "I agree with those Republican and Democratic members of Congress who've recently said that in these challenging days, we can't afford what are called earmarks."

The elimination of earmarks is one of the recommendations from the co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. Their proposal is to be considered by the commission as a whole before it issues a formal list of recommendations by Dec. 1.

But the fiscal impact of earmarks is minuscule compared with most of their targets in a draft that aims to cut about $4 trillion in projected deficits over the next decade.

And earmarks make for a much more generic and politically palatable bull's-eye than Simpson and Bowles' other proposals: cuts to farm subsidies and military budgets, massive reductions in the federal work force, and overhauls of Social Security and the tax code.

Asked about the commission's work at a news conference Friday in Seoul, South Korea, following the G-20 summit, Obama said that "it is our responsibility to the next generation to make sure that that gets solved," but he was unwilling to enter the fiery, budget-cutting debate until the commission's work is done.

"I'm looking forward to getting the official Bowles-Simpson recommendations," he said. "I'm going to study those carefully, consult widely, and see what we can do on the spending side that will have an impact. And then we've got to see how much of a shortfall do we have. And then we're going to have to have a debate, which will probably be a tough debate and has to be an honest debate with the American people about how do we pay for those things that we think are really important."