Power of the Purse: Restoring Congress's Directed Spending Authority

Transcript

well good morning everyone good Monday morning everyone I'm Jason Gourmet with the bipartisan policy Center delighted to uh welcome you to a conversation of one of what I think is the most important elements of competently governing a divided country we are here to talk about direct Congressional spending as we get towards the end of the year get a little reflective and when I think about all the efforts that vpc's democracy team has worked on to try to strengthen the effectiveness of governing I think there's kind of two things that really stand out the first is our efforts to help the federal government to avoid a default on the full faith and credit of the American economy our work on saving the debt ceiling from time to time and the second has been the work here focusing on the ability to re-enable Congress to actually fulfill its article one opportunity and obligation and invest some resources on things that they know and care most about I want to thank Kevin Kosar and AEI for co-sponsoring this event for all of the courageous Partners who have worked together on this issue in ignominity for a number of years um so I just want to kind of set the stage talk a little bit about brief history and then I think the topics we're going to focus on today so we are the bipartisan policy Center and I'm here to tell you that bipartisanship produces the very best and the very worst legislation in American society when as is often the case you have people of different ideologies different points of view different spiritual and political interests coming together around evidence-based work and having the courageous compromise and like that's the good stuff from time to time fearing for um their political Futures you get a kind of herd mentality where the group of buffaloes just starts racing towards the cliff creating a level of momentum that is ultimately impossible to stop and that's what happened in 2011 when then Speaker Boehner and President Obama decided together to claim the you know kind of head fake mantle of fiscal responsibility and deprive the Congress of this very important tool and I say head fake because you know smart folks they know just as we do that um earmarks what they were known at the time do not increase federal spending that they just basically provide the Congress the capacity to spend a fraction of the federal budget as opposed to having the executive branch make all those choices but it felt good it felt like a claim of kind of fiscal sobriety and courage so what happened over then the next decade uh is that decade and you know deficits went to record highs there was a decline in the confidence and competence of Congress and things weren't really looking very well so surprise surprise writing to the rescue the most unlikely of Heroes the bipartisan house select committee on the modernization of Congress there you go first time that's probably ever happened in public um so the select committee had two superpowers the first was that it was powerless right it was an opportunity of people to come together and not you know kind of alienate the Committees and kind of sit down and really do some work together the second was nobody knew what it was I mean could you come up with a more forgettable name for an exercise in strengthening the country and again that gave them the capacity to actually do some smart and courageous things and in 2020 they came out with a set of recommendations among them was a thoughtful effort to revise in significant ways the earmark process consisting with a lot of the recommendations that uh speakers uh here today made and over the last two years we've had robust participation from both you know sides of the aisle um working on now what we understand to be Community Project funding give a lot of credit to the incoming house conference for voting to maintain this tool under what could have been quite a bit of public pressure very smart for them to do it very quickly and so here we are so earmarks are dead Long Live Community Project funding just want to kind of mention two things as we set the stage for uh the conversation we're going to talk a lot about just the balance of power and what has been described as kind of the incredibly shrinking Congress over the last several decades weekend in Congress has been an inside job right most of the ways in which Congress has lost its Authority and diminished its capability have been ways that they have actually undermined their own institutional Integrity or kind of averted their eyes from hard choices things like you know whether the country should declare war and you know other things that the Congress used to take a lot of responsibility for but so we're going to explore how directed Congressional spending really matters how it engages members how it creates some incentive to participate in the legislative process I will just share a quick story I was talking to a pretty Junior member of Congress from the cleveland-ish area after your marks came back and just ask them you know what is this important to you and she said this is the only thing that I'm known for like I my constituents do not know who I am right I got elected I came to Congress I got put on a you know kind of Backwater committee I basically have to vote with leadership just about all the time and the ability to engage in something that I ran on and you know is not a specific to this member but you know the ability to work on you know opioid addiction the ability to address issues around veterans Health Access to strengthen the capacity to land planes at a reasonably small Regional Airport this is how my constituents know me and I think that really says a lot about what a representative democracy is supposed to be about so we'll talk about that we're also going to talk about this evolving process yeah it is reasonable that people were cynical about the earmarks process around 2010 because we went off the rails and a lot of examples of some pretty stupid projects and actually a little bit of like illegality and Corruption and so you know needed to be fixed um and there's been a lot done to fix it so I think we're going to spend some time talking with now two years of experience about what's happened you know what has been the disclosure the deliberation the review the audit process that we think has now strengthened this fundamental mechanism and I will just close with the personal reflection that this is the most scrutinized three tenths of one percent of federal spending that has ever existed in the U.S economy or budget and so I think it is uh important to recognize that this is you know good work that's going to matter I think a great deal not just for the capacity of individual members but really for the Collective Strength of the institution and so with that I turn it over to my friend Kevin to lead the first panel all right thank you Jason well good morning I'm uh Kevin kosaro Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute this first panel kicks off our discussion of congressionally directed spending with a particular focus on community Project funding grants that's a bit of a mouthful and you'll forgive us for occasionally using earmarks as a synonym because it's just to say but they're different so congressionally directed spending uh this new form and we know as Community Project funding grants was created fairly recently and was explicitly designed to replace the old system of earmarks that had been somewhat mothballed and had fallen into Political as favor on this panel I want to have us discuss with some specificity what what these grants are what's the process for getting them we'll also take a look at what grants have been requested what have improved from last year and this year and also compare the new Grant process to the old way of doing business the roadmap for this panel is straightforward we'll have a presentation by one of our panelists who will kind of put out a lot of facts and figures for you all too think about uh and then the panelists will chat a bit and then we'll take audience questions we'll take them from audience sitting here uh but we'll also take them for those who are watching online and if you're watching online you could submit your question at any point during the panel uh via the YouTube chat there's a live chat box you'll see or you can send them in Via Twitter and just use the hashtag pound BP Live BBC live sorry we'll take as many as we can uh before we conclude the panel at 10 45. now let me briefly introduce my three fellow panelists their biographies are long and August but nonetheless the time is short first on my left is that corser is a professor at Claremont McKenna college and a fellow at bpc's democracy project Zach co-leads his College's policy lab and is the editor of the volume parchment barriers political polarization and the limits of constitutional order next Molly Reynolds a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings institution Dr Reynolds studies Congress and the budget process and wrote a very highly regarded book on the Senate titled exceptions to the rule the politics of filibuster limitations in the U.S Senate so she knows procedure she knows budget Bali also I should mention supervisors of the maintenance and publication of vital statistics on Congress Brookings terrific resource on the first branch of government last but certainly not least we have Mark strand Mark has spent many many years in this town and spent many many years on Capitol Hill and spent many many years working with Capitol Hill which is not to say that he's long in the tooth actually he is let's be honest uh he's the president of the Congressional Institute not-for-profit Corporation dedicated to helping members of Congress better serve their constituents and also to helping their constituents better understand their Congress mock is also the co-author of the volume surviving inside Congress a guide for prospective new and not so new Congressional staff it's a very good book now to start the discussion let's turn first to Zach corser Dr corser to discuss the basics of the community Project funding grants take it away thanks Kevin and thanks everyone and good morning I've got 10 minutes to talk about an hour's worth of information so buckle your seat belts I'll do my best here and I'm going to press the forward button uh so there's a lot to talk about like I said Kevin and I actually wrote a paper a white paper for AEI recommending that Congress bring back a reformed uh process for earmarking in 2021 in February Congress listened and within months they enacted a a new system called congressionally directed spending we've a community Grant projects Project funding in the house it's styled differently between the two Chambers we may again use earmark from time to time I don't have time to talk about all the aspects of the new reform process but my presentation will focus in on first off transparency and I think the thing that proves transparency is that I'm able to give you this level of detail about how how every one of these projects was requested and spent upon there's some improvements that could be made to make this stuff more accessible but by and large the fact that I'm even giving you this presentation sort of demonstrates the availability of the information which is unprecedented given the the previous process one of the big changes that happened between fiscal year 22 and 23 I'll be making some comparisons between the two to show you how the process has evolved is that in the House of Representatives one of the important reforms that they made is capping the number of requests for every member it was capped at 10. this year it's capped at 15 and and we'll see that it had an effect on the number of requests in the amount of spending um and largely in this presentation again I've mentioned transparency I'll be talking about how spending priorities have changed markedly from the old earmarking process to this process today I'll be talking about differences between the chambers in terms of distribution how these monies are spent between the states and the role that the Appropriations Committee plays one of the complaints against the old process was that appropriators had too much influence over this and so we'll be testing that hypothesis looking at the house and the Senate um just move on here quickly so in fiscal year 23 we saw a a big rise here in in the number of requests also and in the amount of spending requested in the House of Representatives again I think there's two things that we can attribute that to one of course is that the cap was raised by five the second is that I think the Appropriations committees and members really did a great job rolling out a process that had you know been more abund for 10 years uh many members as was demonstrated by bpc had never been in Congress when there was a system of earmarking so there was a very quick ramp up in fiscal year 22. we've had a year a little more than a year now to think about this process and I think members are now sort of getting into the rhythm of this in terms of identifying projects in terms of you know getting that extra boost in terms of five more requests and so I think the volume of spending and the volume and the number of requests would reflect uh a house and a senate who are now more comfortable who understand this process and in the house have more requests to to make so in terms of participation there's actually a fairly lopsided vote that happened in the house conference to affirm keeping earmarks for for a second fiscal year but we haven't we haven't seen a huge boost in terms of GOP participation it's at 60 percent more or less this year we've got that's that's a rise of two percent over fiscal year 22. but by and large I would say the numbers are pretty static about participation but I think we should keep an eye on fiscal year 24 after this vote in the caucus to see that Republicans might become more interested and feel like sort of the coast is clear this process has proved itself politically and uh institutionally and I hope to see that number go up in terms of the amount of spending it's gone up markedly if you look at the amount approved it's gone up to 107 percent in the House of Representatives and if you look at the Break um and this is I think this is true of the pre-moratorium period of earmarks there was a decision made at the Appropriations level about sort of the split the divide that was going to be made between the majority and the minority and that split as you can see happens to work out to 60 40.

it's pretty clear that that's the decision-making process in in Appropriations uh and that was pretty much true last year was 58.42 let's call it 60 40. that's the split um so uh but you'll see that total spending is 8.7 billion in terms of the amount approved the the approval rates um both for um deciding on projects and the amount that's approved have remained relatively the same and this number again we have to remember one of the big changes that was made is an agreement and a budget cap of one percent of discretionary spending so as I'll show you on one of the last slides this this is so much less money being spent on earmarks than was spent in the old process uh in turn looking at requests by subcommittee Transportation dominates it dominated last year it dominated this year in both Chambers and I think it's really interesting and reflective of this new process that individual members are looking at the needs of their districts and it seems to be infrastructure particularly as related to transportation is a priority across the country and this is a market shift from the priorities of earmarks before the moratorium period again I'll show you on the last slide it was heavily skewed towards defense here you can see defenses actually at the bottom of the list and when I get to the Senate you'll see there's actually no monies approved for defense uh in second place is labor and Health and Human Services um you know you can see that uh Democrats tend to prefer uh Health and Human Services in terms of the both the requests and the number of approvals there's a market difference in some ways there's overlap on Transportation but as you get further down the list Republicans you know for example as you can see here have more of a preference for energy and water Democrats have more of a preference for labor and Health and Human Services I think this is an important point to say that while both Chambers and both parties may have agreement about this as a process they don't necessarily have the same priorities for spending and I think it's important to allow each party whether you're in the majority or the minority to make those decisions on their own there are going to be divergences this has been shown in the premoratorium period too that parties just differ on on that kind of spending and I don't think it makes a lot of sense for the majority to dictate to the minority how this is done I think it I think it de-emphasizes how this is an Institutional mechanism that it's in the individual responsibility of legislators to make these decisions for their district and be held accountable for them uh not to have that dictated by an appropriator or or someone in leadership uh looking comparing fiscal year 22 and 23 you can see that um you know spending has gone up basically across the board priorities seem uh relatively similar both parties continue to be most interested in transportation and health and human uh sorry Housing and Urban Development um differ again energy and water for republicans and also military Construction in the VA versus labor and health and human services for Democrats so now looking at some of the distribution here now this is this is just by State this is not per capita which is sort of looking at overall spending you can see that there are four states that without any participating members uh this year Alaska Montana North and South Dakota um distribution that you see here reflects the size the delegation of population if you just look at it by State unsurprisingly you know California leads followed by Florida Texas New York and Illinois it's really driven by the size but if we do this by a per capita basis things change a little bit we can see that now Florida ranks the highest but you have to remember that Florida has no Senate requests both senators from Florida declined to participate in this process in fiscal year 23. so I'll show you a slide later where combined spending in both Chambers and see things kind of even out for some of those higher approval rates per capita that we see in certain States but by and large I would say with few exceptions the house and their rules and approach with the the cap on 15 requests has had a a salubrious effect on equality in terms of distribution throughout the country there's there's some variations but we can also attribute some of those variations although more studies required to say that you know maybe there are shifting priorities maybe there's a large infrastructure project in one state that might get approved for a particular earmark one year maybe another state might have similar needs but just not quite as expensive so there's there may be some explanations for that um looking at the role of appropriators uh to see if they had an outsized advantage both in terms of the amount of money the number of requests that got approved and the mouse Representatives that's just not the case appropriators actually in some regards are slightly lower in their averages than is the sort of normal Rank and file members so I think the House of Representatives again has done a really positive job in terms of our foreign process that gives each member sort of equal access to to directed spending now let's look at the senate senate differs they don't have this cap at 15 requests and so Senators can make as many requests as they want and as you can see in the number of requests that they make and the amount that they make it's much higher than the House of Representatives they still have though the one percent cap on discretionary spendings or sorry yeah discretionary spending so they're still under the same Financial limits but they're not under the same kind of request limits that the House of Representatives has but otherwise they have similar reforms in in virtually every other regard so if you look at uh Senate requests by party one of the things about the Senate is that you might remember the house or sorry the Senate Republican conference declined to remove a Prohibition against earmarks from their rules what they did is basically said well you don't have to pay so much attention to that particular rule if you would actually like to make a request we're not going to hold you to it but we're not going to take it out of the rules and this has had a chilling effect I think to some degree and raised a kind of bar politically for Republican members to participate and as a consequence only about a third of Republicans in the Senate participate and this contributes I think to some lopsided outcomes in terms of distributional effects between party and also between states as we'll talk about so you can see the number of requests and the amount requested has gone up from fiscal year 22 again I think this has something to do with the process sort of you know being online as it were um much lower approval rate which is sort of in the in the Senate which I think just reflects the higher volume of requests and and the amount requested um in the Senate um but again numbers are sort of up across the board you notice that this partisan split in the Senate is different than it is in the house this may reflect uh you know a more bipartisan approach to this process or the fact that it was an even 50 50 split and so you know sort of by necessity the the split between parties would be narrower than in the house uh request by subcommittee um uh looking at this you can see that you know the priorities are only slightly different than in the House of Representatives but the the amount of requests doubles out of the house there's you know a big difference in terms of not limiting the number of requests Senators ask for a lot even though they get about half as much in return um Interiors second in the Senate and it's fourth in the house you know maybe this has to do with Statewide projects and the fact that senators are more interested in interior requests than the House of Representatives is no defense accounts open for directed spending in the Senate they don't approve anything um so this you know obviously has an effect on the amount of defense spending that comes from earmarks uh so yeah more requests means a lower chance of success it's only about 20 I kept the the uh why access the same here in terms of spending so you can see how little was approved compared to how much was requested so there's a lot more churning through these requests and the Senate then is in the house and again a more Equitable split and you can see spending actually priorities in terms of what was approved pretty even throughout the Senate much more so than in the house partisan preferences are not as strong in the in the Senate and then comparison of 22 and 23 in terms of spending things seem up across the board increases in requested funding in all categories except Financial Services preferences are similar between parties about Transportation interior labor military construction and energy so now we talk about uh just the distribution this this is just by population you can see already there are 12 states without participating senators all of whom are GOP I take that back there's a couple of Democrats excuse me but nonetheless uh this this creates a kind of lopsided outcome if you think about the country as a whole there are so many more Senators that are not participating and so as a consequence there's a skew here in a number of ways towards appropriators and towards states that have members both in the Senate and the house that want to participate and so you can see spending doesn't reflect the state population you've got some winners here up front with Alaska Oklahoma Hawaii Alabama Missouri um you know California ranks sixth you know even even just looking at it by state if we do this by a per capita it becomes even more exaggerated you can see that Alaska is the leader in the clubhouse this is even without the participation of Don young you know who unfortunately was deceased and could not have any requests this is all Lisa murkowski um and you can see that on on the top end here um it's a lot of appropriators um as I'll sort of show you appropriators do very well in this process in the Senate um there's some reasons for this I think it has to do with the fact that uh many of the appropriators that are on the Republican side of the committee are eager participants in this process whereas many of their colleagues choose not to participate so you know if you don't ask for anything you don't get and the appropriators are asking they're more comfortable this process and as a and as a consequence it's really sort of throwing things off a bit in terms of distribution um if we look at it overall let's combine the house and the Senate and look at overall directed spending in fiscal year 23 a couple things happen one of the things is there's actually only two states that get zero participation Montana and North Dakota they get zero directed spending because none of their delegation participates but but by and large you can see that for the most part the distribution is fairly even except on the high end and I think it again it's the Senate that that's throwing this off you've got Alaska way ahead if you put Florida and Texas and combine it into an average you see that there they see you see that they go sort of the middle of the pack they're no longer looking on the high end of things but we've got some states that really stand out um I don't have time to talk about that so comparing to premoratorium earmarks you can see that spending and priorities have changed dramatically if you look at the average of earmark spending from 2008 to 2010 military construction and VA energy and water Dominate and now you can see that they don't at all it's the price the new priorities are Transportation labor Health and Human Services and education and again I think this reflects a changed process um you know at the risk of sounding normative I think these actually reflect um local preferences rather than National ones and I think it's a demonstration that of the the program working as intended uh so some conclusions uh in the House Broad participation continued between both Chambers and both parties uh GOP rules still undermine broad participation in the Senate that hasn't changed uh there there were changes on the house side requests increased 57 percent funding increased 107 but like I said I think that's because the process is online but still much less spending than the old system change spending priorities a starkers partisan split on the house side and not much of an appropriator's advantage really none generally equitable distribution that's very different on the Senate side while they have a more equitative part Equitable partisan divide we can see that there's continued Equity concerns sort of about distribution if you think about appropriators if you think about overrepresented States and uneven participation it seems like the Senate could maybe do more to think about this sort of distributional effect and how they can maybe modify their rules to try to correct for that but it'll be a very hard thing to do until Republican Senators I think are more involved in this process and more committed to the idea of directed spending so I don't know where I was on 10 minutes there but I did my best well done well done lots of material there thank you thank you for doing that uh Molly let me turn to you you've been watching this year mark our community grants uh process as it's been developed and unfold you've heard Zach's presentation your budget profit expert or procedure expert Congress expert what stands out to you what do you think's worthy of notice yeah excuse me so let me start by just um first thing I want to do is underline something Zach actually mentioned which is the degree to which our ability to talk about this data at this level of specificity is itself a real achievement of the new um the new regime if you will the new approach to Distributing funding for specific projects to communities around the country and so that alone is a is a really big shift and I think a really important one for restoring the faith both of people inside the chamber and Americans across the country that this process is unfolding in a sort of transparent and deliberative way so I'll start there second thing I'll say is I was really struck by you know Zach reflected a little bit on the differences that we saw between the house and the Senate particularly in the level of Republican participation and I would venture that to go back to kind of one of the things that Jason was talking about in his introduction the four house members of both parties where or so much power is now centralized in the hands of party leaders securing funding for projects in their communities through this program to this this approach to Distributing funding is just much more important for house members who are seeking to kind of build reputations with their constituents that it might be for senators so you know if you are a senator your name recognition among the people who vote for you is probably much higher to begin with than for house members and so I think again particularly in the current House of Representatives where members often feel like they don't have a lot of agency and what happens this is a really important tool for members to accomplish things that are important to their communities and also to really feel like they have skin in the game in the legislative process to really sort of put in the effort to learn how to do this this well and then the last thing I'll say is really just sort of a question for thinking about what helps we can learn from this data going forward so Zach talked a little bit about the way in which the distribution of earmarks across policy areas is different and sort of Appropriations bills is different now than it was in the the pre-moratorium period And I one thing that I'm excited about the ability to dig into with this kind of data that we now have is how much does that reflect kind of other changes in federal spending priorities is it the is it the case that part of why we're seeing say more Transportation projects more labor HHS projects is because there's this desire sort of catch up on places where there was maybe less other kinds of spending in the interim I don't know but that again is the kind of thing that we can now do with this information to help us enhance our broader understanding of Congress all right thank you Mark I um you know you know of course that's uh the GOP has been a very divided mind about these for some years uh one example is that we have two senators from Alaska uh murkowski and Sullivan and Ms murkowski participates in the air marking process and Mr Sullivan does not can you speak to the kind of divided GOP mind on this and you know where they are now and what what should we make of the fact that you know when the new house majority met a few weeks ago overwhelmingly voted to retain or to at least not adopt a Prohibition of participating in the community grants process thanks Kevin I I think one of the most interesting things is that to me the whole process of directing spending is a very Republican idea what it's constitutional that the Congress that Congress is supposed to have a constitutional responsibility two it's a basic question who do you want determining what gets spent in your District the administration or you and so a transparent process I always say if you are if you're not willing to put out a press release on it you shouldn't do it which in the old days it used to be a lot of secret ones but also it's very practical for Republicans many of them represent rural districts um they don't have big grant writers like the big cities do New York uh Los Angeles they they have whole teams that can write grants and the rural areas don't have these resources but members of Congress can get this money funded for them second I I I think another point of this is that uh probably the appropriation process here with a chair like Kate Granger gave them a little confidence that there's not going to be a lot of prolific spending uh but it'll be kept down we won't have add-ons instead of direct and spending of existing programs which I think is a very important part of that and the other thing being a close majority is that um they're going to need help passing some of these bills uh you know one of the most important things about Congress lately is they don't legislate very few legislate but now this process allows them to legislate again the difficult thing is when you're in the minority if you get a direct project in your District it's kind of hard to vote against that appropriation Bill the campaign commercial practically writes itself you can't take credit for you so it encourages bipartisan majorities for appropriation bills and then finally for a lot of these freshmen given the fact that the Democrat the Senate is Democrat and the administration's Democrat some of their only accomplishments the system are going to be things they get done this process and the appropriation bills which must pass so to me it was a no-brainer that they did this uh the new process being so much more transparent uh that everything is spelled out in black and white it's part of the record it's codified in law I think it will increase the Comfort level and I think we'll see Republican participation go up this year we are right at 10 40 and I want to use this moment to ask our audience if you have any questions for the panel or on the data you have seen you sir go ahead [Music] there's any difference do you all have any recommendations for either one oh yes I spent I can there there was some some very tired undergraduates who were going through a lot of PDFs to try to put this uh information for me together to analyze so there's a difference between availability and accessibility and I think on the front end with requests the house is probably the best job they just put out an Excel spreadsheet it's just all there the Senate puts it up on their website and it's all on member websites too but in terms of a centralized resource the Senate just puts it up on the web so you've got to scrape the web to get all this information but really the worst part is on approvals like I've only you know these this isn't law yet these are just what the appropriators have decided they're going to approve and in the uh the Senate this is all on PDFs which is really difficult it lacks information it's really difficult to merge this with names I mean it's it's just not it's a bit clunky and I think I think it's reflective of sort of a work product that they're used to I don't think it's an intention to mislead or make things difficult but I do think there's more work that could be done to sort of make this uh clearer more palatable but I will say also if you wait long enough as we'll probably talk about I think in the next panel the GAO is doing a really great job in terms of tracking the spending once it actually becomes law they have a really detailed series of reports about all the different spending bills and all the different earmarks within them that does help to make this uh more transparent even more transparent but I would say that yes the house and the Senate could put this in a much more user-friendly format for those of us that want to get a sort of overall lay of the land all right we have a question from online uh if defense earmarks have essentially vanished has the process of earmarking Defense projects move to the ndaa I would like to handle that one I got it I mean I would just say quickly one thing um one thing that we didn't mention so far is that one of the biggest changes from the old system is no more earmarks for for-profit entities and so the spending priorities have shifted away from defense I think and that's one of the reasons why it shifted towards local priorities you know this has to be non-profits you know uh counties you know local needs and I think that's reflected in the shift too defense lobbying and sort of the the pressure of on legislators to use these for defenses really subsided and I think maybe it's gone in in different directions but I can't really say so much about where I think you also have to point out that one of the most egregious abuses was representative Cunningham which is mostly earmarking in the black budget which was completely invisible to people and was was rather blatant in terms of its abuse so I think maybe defense in particular because of that reason wants to stay away from it as much as possible for the time being it may change in the future but for now I think they are content to let the other committees do that congressionally directed spending very good priorities list so when they didn't get it in the four three bites of the Apple it came in later then that was your mark and I wonder that would be a really interesting thing to look at to see if the unfunded parties list exists anymore or if that's been put into like the emergency spending for Iraq and Afghanistan just became another budget item s you know contingency operations account so like I think the money is definitely still there but it's not being accessed the same yeah it's worth mentioning it very briefly that during the sometimes sometimes called a ban on earmarks that existed for a decade or so some call them moratorium congressionally directed spending still happened uh it happened in other ways there were letter marking was another vehicle for doing it was phone marking where members of Congress would call up executive agencies and say by the way could you consider this project ahead of others etc etc so the kind of desire to engage in that uh is kind of innate to being a legislator and we know that um also when Congress loses power in this Arrangement the executive branch still directs the funding um my Brookings college John Hudak has worked quite a bit on this question of where presidents direct resources and so we know the money is still going out the door it's just going out the door in a way that's less that's farther removed from the individuals who are most in tune with the needs of their communities yes yes it's no surprise that when presidents are running for re-election particularly that the grants going out to states where uh that are swing States seem to get a bit more the behest of the executive branch go ahead in the back please yeah uh hi thank you this is a great panel um I'm Jeff Edelstein um so I have a question I'm not I'm interested in earmarks but I'm not an expert so um has there been any change you know the public thinks that earmarks used to sort of Grease the wheels to get legislation passed um has it always been tied just to Appropriations or did it help with authorizing legislation and am I correct that now the way you're talking it's only with Appropriations I that's a great question and we don't have much time left I'll try to answer it very quickly so when Kevin and I wrote this report for AEI one of the things that that I did is I interviewed 10 former members of Congress all of whom had participated either within Appropriations or not in Appropriations in the sort of pre-earmarks era and the moratorium era and one of the things that I found on this question of the greasing the wheels was that it happened but it was an exception these were things that you know happened sometimes you know sometimes the leadership would try to dangle a carrot on a vote but it wasn't the standard it actually was kind of I won't say boring but a kind of like you know well-known process that there's going to be some amount of in the budget put aside for earmarking that it would be divided between the majority and the minority and that those parts of the appropriation committee would basically decide on on who would get what now politics could play a role in that but for the most part other than a kind of objection to appropriators having too much influence in that process in terms of who got what it wasn't this kind of top down you know greasing the wheels you know we're the leadership and we're dictating how this is going to go uh I don't think it really worked that way I think that was much more the exception than the rule thank you another thing I would add to that is that it's interesting how much fewer authorization bills passed yes once the moratorium went into effect yes and so a large degree that was an incentive to get these bills passed and uh it used to be that the house would enforce its rules that you can't appropriate anything that hasn't been authorized so all the more reason they should go back to doing authorization I think the important way to think about that is there's a difference between greasing the wheels in the form of do you get individual people to vote for it because you give them earmarks versus greasing the wheels in terms of is there an incentive to do the thing at all because collectively folks want to get their projects out of the process so I think you know right now like literally as we speak we're having this debate over whether there's going to be an Omnibus versus a full year CR and one consideration in that debate is whether um everyone will get their earmarks and so that's a different question um from sort of what Zach was talking about and I completely agree about getting individual members at the margins to vote for something well all right regrettably we are just past time at 10 47 and we have to make space for the next call next uh panel to step up so Zach Molly mark thank you very much [Applause] as we're gonna get started with panel two again thanks everyone for being here and uh we I think we had a good discussion with the first panel about uh some of the data some of the numbers some of the discussion um about the the politics of this issue uh we're going to take the second panel and focus a lot more on digging into the process and what has happened over this last the 117th Congress we have some great Representatives here who can help us talk through what it was like to be on the inside as a congressional staff member learn a little bit more about some of the reforms the technology issues talk a little bit more about some of the accountability questions that have come up and just really learn about this process that got restarted after there was a 10-year moratorium fully getting into some of the questions maybe about some of the improvements that could be made and some of the reforms so I'd like to just briefly do a quick introduction of the colleagues on the stage here immediately to my left is Brittany madney she's a deputy chief of staff and legislative director for representative Ashley Henson as a republic looking from Iowa Britney's worked on the house side for more than 10 years and a couple of different capacities but basically Britney's been a key lead in her office for a member who's a freshman and was on the Appropriations Committee and they definitely dived into the Congressional Project funding and I have some great examples of their their of their experience next to her is Ann Meeker she's the director of special projects at popbox Foundation popbox has really been at the intersection of Civic engagement and a lot of the questions about Innovation and working with Congress on how to sort of improve its processes she previously worked in leading constituent services for representative Seth Moulton from Massachusetts um following is Lars seanander and he's a policy technologist at Lincoln Network Lincoln is another uh Civil Society organization among many of us here who um have really been on the Forefront of the free market questions um and getting into the Innovation issues and technology and Lincoln has really been a lead on that and Lars can give us a a little bit of insight more about some of the questions about technology and about Innovation and how that can play into this process um and then finally We Have Allison Bodwin she's a director at the government accountability office Allison has a home team but has been a co-lead for this new project following up on congress's call for some follow-up after these member requests have been enacted and she can give us a little bit more insight on what the GAO has done since the the March and the enactment of the fiscal year 22 Appropriations so they call it I really appreciate you being here um so first of all I'd like to ask Brittany um first of all thanks for being here and taking a little time off uh from the house side and maybe tell us what's going on this week and the challenges but um in a bigger picture you have a very unique perspective from the standpoint of you're in a personal office the house side decided to bring these back after a decade what was it like from your experience of starting up a new process um your boss's experience how you engage as constituents how you worked with the committee um what were some of the challenges you saw what were some of the results from your office potentially and how you continued to work through that what do you see in the 118th Congress House Republicans had a conversation about this and decided to keep them and maybe your boss was involved in that kind of conversation and what do you see if there was any additional changes that may come about with the house continuing them but making some additional reforms so lots of questions love to hear about you uh well first of all Fran thank you for hosting this for inviting me to participate I think that it's such an important conversation that we have not only in general but now as we're making that transition into the 118th Congress we're going into a period where a lot of uh uncertainty is afoot with spending Congressional spending in general and it's important that everyone is at the table everyone is having this conversations I think it's awesome that both sides of the aisle on both sides of the Capitol are engaging so it's not just bipartisans bipartisan and bicameral and that's the only way that we can really move forward in a factive way and make sure that we're advocating for taxpayers so with that I will preface this by saying you will hear this word from me once earmarks and you will not hear it from me again because we are not talking about that we were talking about what our office calls cpfs that's Community Project funding other offices may use other terms people who were here the last time that these things were in play may use other terms but there is a reason that we call them cpfs and it is because the cpfs today are not the same thing the same process the same type of funding even as the earmarks of old so I want to lay the ground now you'll hear me use a CPT cpf term the reason I'm using it is because we truly Embrace that in our office we Embrace that in the Appropriations Committee these are ways for congress for members of Congress who are closest to the people they are representing to get funding to community projects hence Community Project funding so I think that leads into one of your questions Franz about what's different why are they back how has this changed massive changes in oversight massive changes in transparency and accountability you can't just sort of throw a dart at a board and hope that it's going to land on some big funding for your District these days there's a very careful process in place I think most offices who have engaged with the cpf process now will tell you that there's a lot of Staff work on the front end of this process that makes sure that there is transparency and accountability one rule that we use if is if you wouldn't be excited and your member wouldn't be excited for a project to be on the front page of a local newspaper you shouldn't be engaging in that project and I think that helps keep taxpayers confident in this process and it helps keep offices accountable huge part of that accountability is the transparency requirements now so you had mentioned asking about what we're doing what some of our successes have been I can tell you about those but I can also point you to hinson.house.gov and have you go look at our webpage that says what Ashley Henson has submitted for cpfs not only this year but the previous year because we have an archive up there as well and that's a requirement our office actually goes above and beyond provides more information than is required to engage in this process we think it's really important that we put as much information out for the public as possible um but every office has to put some information one piece of information that we share is sort of our foundational Basics right who the who the project is what the project is who's the money going to how much did she request uh the address of that project you can see and verify that it's either in the district or has a clear District impact and a short summary of that project we also have to share a financial disclosure statement certifying that my boss my member of Congress for whom I work does not have any financial interest in this project nor does her family that's new none of this was there in the past I think that really changes the way that staff and members approach these projects it's also changing the way communities are approaching the projects because they can now see the success that happened previously and sort of take a look at that and say oh okay well congresswoman Henson got some significant funding for a firehouse in protovin Iowa a community of about 200 people and they were never going to be able to get funding without this I'm a small town sheriff or police department and I don't think I'm going to be eligible for a Department of Justice Grant without some help if she could do it for protivin maybe she can do it for me right and for us it's really about being a voice for those communities that do not have another option or opportunity right if we're talking about protiven they don't have a professional grant writer they don't even have a professional fire department they have a volunteer fire department and they're responsible for taking care of their community and many of the surrounding communities it's all AG land if one of those fields goes up everything is destroyed this Regional economy is set back an incredible amount when they came to us for a project request we couldn't really understand the request that they had written so we asked them to send us a video you know can you send us a video show us what kind of construction you're asking us for what do you mean your fire trucks don't go inside and so they said okay so that all the volunteer firefighters got together and they filmed a video on some good somebody's phone and they showed us you cannot get in the truck while having your gear on so someone has to remove their gear back the truck out which by the way the door doesn't close if the truck's in because the the current station was too small back the truck out then put your gear back on then load back into the truck and someone has to go manually close the doors that the fire station isn't open and then they could proceed so they were telling us this could be five six minutes that's a life that could be lost that's property damage in rural Iowa where you may never get that back it's an entire community and so we saw this video and we thought oh my gosh we're gonna fight for these guys you've got to do it and for Ashley you know once we'd gone through sort of our our process of validating the project which we'll talk about and a little bit once they had cleared that process for her this was sort of emblematic of what a cpf should be it's a small town but it's a core function of government it is a good reliable use of taxpayer dollars we can see for ourselves where the money is going to be spent spent we're potentially helping this community of volunteer firefighters save lives and we're knowing that they don't have the resources to ask the federal government for a grant in any other way they don't have a professional grant writer no hate to Chicago or San Francisco or Miami or New York but those big cities have professional grant writers they can engage with the federal government in a meaningful way outside of the cpf process they want to engage through it that's great that's up to their members but my boss doesn't represent any of those big cities she represents tiny towns in rural Iowa and she represents Cedar Rapids and Dubuque and water blue which by Iowa standards are pretty significant cities we love them and are thrilled with them but even they have challenges when they're up against Chicago and so for us this is a way to go into those communities say what is it that you need what are you already eligible for but don't know how to walk along this process how can we help you get there this is not new money we're not giving anyone new money it's already money that's going to be appropriated through these programs that are largely already agreed upon in bipartisan we just want our small communities like protiven to have a fair shock give them a chance at getting through this process that is incredibly complex incredibly bureaucratic and we can be the ones that assist them through that so that's sort of a quick overview of why we've engaged in this process how we decided to make the decision to engage um and I think moving into the 118th thinking through the oversight measures already in place so that good projects like the protoban firehouse can move forward but bad projects problematic projects and projects where there may be corruption at play don't move forward is really important I think the measures that we have put in place now are great and I do believe that we can only strengthen those going forward okay great thanks um and I'd like to ask Ann a little bit more and and you also worked in the house you know this has been a new process and Brittany brings up an example of an office that was very actively engaged and and really embraced this but many many members are new uh so 58 of the Senate and 70 percent of the house were new since all this had been in place since the 10-year moratorium so new members new staff in personal offices and committees constituents of from a small local government to ngos who had staff who had left so sort of a massive sort of Education campaign and so pop fox has kind of been at the Forefront of that but can you talk a little bit more about the type of things that that you did in the popbox foundation did in terms of resource guides and engagement and and trying to help people better understand this process now that it had been set up and you know what do you see for things that officer that did well officers could make improvements sort of kind of been there so how did we fill in the gaps and what what couldn't be done in the 118th Congress yeah absolutely France in it thank you so much for uh for your partnership on all of that work it's certainly not sole credit to the popbox foundation but we've been delighted to partner with bpc um so I'm really struck hearing uh about the about the team Henson process so the popbox foundation really works on three or three buckets so we work on capacity we work on engagement and we work on Innovation and earmarks are excuse me cpf cpfs forgive me I'm not as disciplined on the new terms um cpfs are so interesting because they really are a microcosm where all three of these things come together so hearing about the Hanson process Brittany how many hours take your team to get that process off the ground oh and total well I would say probably a good 30 hours a week if you add up the staff time for the first four or five weeks and then following that first four or five weeks off the ground certainly a good good chunk of time after that maybe 10 hours after that per week which is just phenomenal considering how overstretched Congress is as a whole how much Congress is just really struggling with staff capacity to do all of the demands that are laid on it so when cpfs were announced and on the Senate equivalent as well we really thought and we came together with with bpc I think oh my goodness this is such an exciting process this is such an exciting opportunity but the impact that this has on capacity is is phenomenal I mean the amount of individual duplicative work that each office is working on to set up these processes um even offices that don't go as above and beyond to really make that an inclusive transparent accountable process that's an incredible impact on the institution so we teamed up with with bpc to put together some basic manuals just if you are a new staffer if you are a new office how do you approach this where do you start how should you vet a non-profit I certainly wouldn't know where to start on what is a 990 how do I find a 990 how do I figure out if you actually have a plan to spend down this money how do I have how do I figure out if you know how much money you should be asking for um so we came together to to do some of those manuals so um in the in the process of of developing those manuals really had the chance to kind of look at where are the pain points for staff where is that capacity not being used effectively for the institution because I think that's one of the big takeaways for me that the process decisions from the committee have this overall impact on institutional capacity um and that really impacts how offices can carry out that engagement so into the second bucket that we work on as we as we mentioned you know this is new for staff this is new for requesters as well so uh where offices don't do don't have the capacity to do that really thoughtful comprehensive Outreach the process favors organizations it favors larger governments who have those grant writers it favors the larger non-profits you know the University Systems the hospital systems that are familiar with the process that maybe employed someone who worked in earmarked before the ban excuse me cpfs before the ban and knew what to look for and knew what to ask for new to call and say I want to talk to your probe staff or I want your form how do I do this uh so the capacity really translates into how can offices take advantage of this opportunity to have a better engagement process I think there's so much potential in the way that cpfs work for offices to use that as an opportunity to bring constituents in not just requesters but bring in constituents to give input into this process we were talking a bit before the panel how for many new offices this year earmarks may be one of the few tangible things that they can show at the end of the year for their constituents that they've done and so that's also one of the few opportunities for constituents to say hey I weighed in on something with my member of Congress where my voice had an impact and we really did see some offices go above and beyond to develop engagement processes that brought constituents into that decision-making process which was really exciting we saw some some offices really innovate in uh in kind of proactive Outreach to the community so the late representative Don young as soon as earmarks uh cpfs came back uh sent out immediately a huge blast to his entire District coincidentally his entire state to say earmarks are back what do you want to see as a community as a member of my community as a constituent here what should I prioritize in my application process what do you what would make the most difference in your community it's kind of proactive prioritizing from the community um on the back end we saw Representatives like Chris pompous in New Hampshire uh once they had all their applications in opened that back up to the community and say which of these should we fund what do you how would these projects have an impact on you and on your life um really interesting way to bring in community and put there as well uh we also saw offices again thinking about the capacity to find innovative ways to bring in their District staff so really take advantage of those on the ground relationships and say you know our DC team on the Appropriations may not know all of the teeny tiny non-profits and the tiny little organizations and fire departments and police departments and um you know self-defense Studios who want to train uh trained sheriffs and non-violent suspect control and de-escalation that just may not rise to the level of DC so how can we bring those those into the fold um and then we also saw some offices again really innovate in transparency so I know rep Kilmer who's also the chair of the house select committee on modernization did some cool things where he published the criteria that his team was going to use to evaluate applications really a step forward and transparency transparency to say if you apply and you don't get selected here's why you know what we're looking for in advance so I think it's really encouraging to see the innovation in this space happen in individual offices so for me what I'm hoping for in the next year is to see more formalized ways of sharing those best practices among offices we did see a lot of that for the Committees I think committee staff did an incredible job highlighting good examples from their members I know we heard a committee staff sharing forms around saying hey you're trying to build a form this office has a really good one or this office has run into problems when they try to ask a question like this so maybe take a look at a different example I think that's where the whole institution can benefit as far as capacity as far as Innovation and engagement is to say to kind of raise the floor and say Here's the level that we're going to set as an institution this is what we're no matter where you are in the country if your members participating in the cpf program here's the Baseline that you can expect as an applicant as a as a constituent engaging in the process so that's what I'm hoping for hoping to see a little bit more of that formalized and made available especially to new members great thanks um and I'd like to ask Laura's um Lars is a member of the Lincoln Network um it's been one of the really important Civil Society organizations that's been actively involved in the house modernization process and your organization's been at the Forefront of the technology and Innovation questions I mean you hear a little bit from Ann and Brittany about just the the projects that that come forward and made requests and this it can be overwhelming to offices on that sort of input side and sort of processing all of that and um a lot of Staff time comes into that how does the committee process it but you know can you tell us a little bit more about first of all maybe how the modernization committee sort of then influenced a little bit of the Appropriations committee's decisions um in terms of article one authorities but just really dig into some of the key technology questions to help with the staff capacity um both in the personal offices and the committee outside of that how can we make improvements on that and sort of how can we manage a lot of this because this can be really overwhelming sure glad to hear be be here friends happy to talk about the more technical aspects of cfp cpf Reform if we're not going to call it earmark reform anymore so what we have right now compared to what the mod com committee came out with I'd say is a moderate option the no chains option what do we have no earmarks what I'd say would be the biggest change would be if we fully implemented what the modcon proposal would had which was instantly flipped how earmark so to speak would do on its head where it would come directly from communities first and then go up in stages of approval and only then reaching Congress at the very end instead what happened is a lot of the transparency reforms got implemented such as public-facing websites public-facing data Criterion being made public however arguably that did not go far enough so a problem facing members of Civil Society right now is a lot of the data is all over the place so for example consider this there's a earmarks website for every member of Congress and those websites are being overwritten as we speak with the fiscal year 2023 earmarks this makes it a little bit painful if one wants to figure out what they successfully use their cfp to spend last year on on the data side on the one hand it's very good but the proposals were made into spreadsheets what's not so good is that every single appropes got made into a PDF that's not formatted for properly if you looked at the PDF the rows are not even properly formatted it's like vertically so you sort of have to shift your head a little bit to read it properly I was recently informed by Allison that the reason the GAO has the data in the first place is some poor data scientist had to transcribe all these PDFs into a single spreadsheet that could then be properly analyzed who knows how many man hours that took compared to the data scientists being able to do their job well I mean this is their job but they prefer to be doing data science instead of scraping so on the technical side there's room for improvement such as building out apis for this data instead of PDFs and strangely formatted spreadsheets having a single Authority build a single website for this instead of members running their own websites and this goes brought more broadly into Lincoln's work in Article 1 reform because the power to access disperse These funds is a part of Congress that has not been around for a while because of the controversies back in the early 2000s so money that Congress could have been spending was spent by other entities and just to jump into a bit of a future on this Walter's room and there's discussion on building up potential new interfaces for this data at the moment it's unclear if any of these new technical implementations will be implemented because simply there's limited capacity in Congress at the moment to do this type of technical work because the person responsible for uploading those PDFs is one of a few it people within Congress so it's a difficult ask but it needs to be asked if there's a better way to display this data because frankly there should be somebody who's doing this part-time wrangling everybody into displaying this data properly versus the sort of ad hoc systems because the websites for the committee for the approach are not even standardized as well which can also be seen on the committee websites but that's a different story yeah and so well it's been a vast Improvement to get it in somewhat of a centralized place it's still as you said very ad hoc by individual offices by the committee putting it up in the form that it has and then for all those outside groups like ours to be able to try to look at and interpret it yeah um things that's really important commentary um one of the improvements one of the additional transparency measures that was put in place for the first time um both mentioned by the house modernization committee and then picked up by the Appropriations committees was to ask the an a key entity an independent entity to look at these requests after they had been enacted and so that was requested for fiscal year 22 and then we anticipate will be in place for fiscal year 23. um so Allison is a director and has co-led the effort within the government accountability office to do that and this is great I mean we really appreciate you uh being here and be able to talk about it because it's probably something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention it's the first time this has existed to look back after enactment um there's always been these questions about what happened to all those member tens of thousands of member requests over the the past years can you just tell us a little bit more about what did uh the the first requests were enacted with uh March in FY 22 Omnibus what did the ga do how did you get started kind of how are you organized what what have you been able to put out publicly so far you have a a web portal tracking the funds uh tell us a little bit more about that what are you looking at doing down the road and sort of how do you see it coming together you talked to the preparations committee and you also were talking to the agencies who received the funds so just lots of key questions about what GAO has done and what can we see coming forward in the yeah thank you so much for having me today I appreciate it um and there's a lot that my colleagues on the panel have said that resonates with the work that GAO has done so I hope to be able to touch on that um so as you as you noted our role released starts after Appropriations passage so very interesting to hear all about the Congressional processes leading up to that and the technical support provided to potential recipients of these funds so we really came in at the point after Bill passage in for FY 22 we were asked to do two things the first was to assist the Appropriations committees with FY 23 and sort of look at the process and think about how it went and if there are changes or observations we could make that would help the process improve going forward and the second thing was to sample projects for FY 22 and look at actually how those projects are performing so to date we've really focused on the first part which was supporting the FY 23 process and the primary reason for taking that approach is because with the length of the continuing resolution we didn't have a strong expectation that there would be very much progress on actually executing these projects during y22 we're hopeful that you know in particular for those that received one-year funding Authority that the money would at least get obligated to those projects but it takes some time so we focused on supporting the Congress for FY 23 and that really put our focus on the 18 agencies that were executing These funds in some cases the agencies are spending the funds themselves but in most cases the money is being distributed through existing Grant programs or other financial assistance mechanisms to State and local governments tribal territorial governments as well as non-profit organizations and higher education organizations and so we went out we kind of dispatched GAO to all of the 18 agencies that received these funds and on our tracking the funds website we published 19 reports between September and October one for each of the agencies and another that was sort of a national kind of summary report as well as a downloadable data set that anybody can can grab and look at the universe of projects that were funded through the house and Senate processes and so going forward we're beginning to develop our sampling mechanisms now for looking at progress on those FY 22 projects we're also undertaking a bit of a more significant data review um and my colleague Tom is sitting right here and is nodding along so I know I'm not saying anything off base um but um that that data review that we're looking at is um can we use available data sources either through something like USA spending or from access GAO has in working with agencies to to obtain data from their financial systems to examine the universe of these projects and kind of what the status is on obligation and expenditure it's complicated because you get data in there's Corrections we don't want to put out anything that confuses people but um so we're examining what data is available and how reliable it is and whether we could report on the Universe of these projects but certainly we will be sampling them going forward to look at how they're performing and for FY 23 if the bill passes and our our authority to to continue this work is in there we would sort of proceed along that same fashion and just include any of the projects funded for the next fiscal year so um we had some I guess some observations from the project that I could share a little bit and I think the first is that when we spoke with in particular appropriation staff there was Keen interest in us helping people understand timing and so in part that had to do with the continuing resolution but in part it has to do with the fact that once Appropriations pass it's not like checks get written to the recipients the next day and in most cases the funding was going to pass through agency programs where there are requirements on recipients even if those recipients are not being competitively awarded the funds so they still need to register in federal systems that provides you know payment information and um you know allows us the the government to make sure um that their Min that the risk of fraud is minimized other kinds of things like that there are still Grant Apple locations to complete spending plans monitoring plans all those sorts of things and often the recipients especially as as my colleagues noted um were sort of new to this um agencies had to provide significant technical assistance to those recipients in order to get everything in order for them to receive their funds and then some of the funding you know from the FY 22 projects is is multi-year and had two three four five or an infinite number of years to be obligated by the agency and so agencies have set timelines for those and those are some of the things we'll be looking at going forward thanks I mean one of the the challenges that I think a lot of uh sort of the average person doesn't recognize as we said this is all within the funding that's been allocated through the discretionary uh funding levels but um it's it's one percent so this last year was actually a little bit less than one percent it was just under 10 uh 10 billion so there was a little room but about 5 000 projects um that a lot of Staff time goes into uh to putting that together from GAO from personal offices to committee uh to sort of maintain and essentially make sure that system is in place um I think we have a time for some questions um if you do have a question um my colleague has a microphone to come around to ask a question so foreign Kelly I'm at Georgetown at Georgetown democracy education and service at the new project I'm setting up at the McCourt School my question is um having gone and lived in small town Rural America during the pandemic to take care of a parent I really noticed uh just in talking to neighbors how little Americans just run-of-the-mill conversation see themselves as participants in their democracy much less their institutions I really noticed this uh with the you know the antagonisms over the mask masking and the pandemic but also after January 6. so one of the hopes I have for Community grants is to also build legitimacy back for the institution and it seems that in order to do that we need to create and find some best practices of sort of participatory methods in a sort of what as you were saying like the dream was for this to be percolate up from Grassroots almost communities um there's I know a few little bright spots I know and you you documented this like two years ago of where there were more sort of curated by the member so the member is still sort of the um you know the Den pack leader or talking to the community um did you see improvements of that or new methods or other ways that we can start helping members sort of curate that so that it's a partnership with the community but at its more participatory yeah absolutely I can jump in on that thank you Lorelei um definitely I think I flagged a few examples of members who had taken the risk to try something along those lines and I do want to just emphasize the fact that it is a risk on some level for members to try to shape the process it's for me I think there are more the benefits outweigh the risks are members to try to open up their process to be more transparent accountable but there is you're always going to make somebody unhappy if you say I'm going to accept projects along the following 10 priorities and that's it like the people in the rest of the 500 million priorities out there in your District are going to be upset um so it's interesting to see members take that risk to say you know for for our team the benefit is going to outweigh any any potential blowback here again for um the late rep Don Young's office to say hey Community what are your priorities or for the Kilmer team to say here's the criteria that we're going to we're going to look at um I will say also in in the course of our research and are putting together our community guide uh I got to kind of follow along with some with a few potentially eligible recipients in my neck of the woods in Cleveland Ohio um and it was interesting hearing some of the hesitations about engaging in this program and again I was just talking to them unconnected to the offices that they would be applying through um there are a lot of assumptions here out there you're right for how this process would work and why I should not engage with it so eligible requesters saying well I assume that the member is only going to pick their friends or I assume that this process is uh irrevocably corrupt or I assume that this is adding money to the federal deficit rather than choosing where to direct money that will be spent regardless um so there's a huge barrier for Congressional offices to overcome into addressing that skepticism and addressing misconceptions about the process so I think the way forward there is Congressional offices making their process as transparent as possible saying here's how I am soliciting responses here's what my form looks like here's the criteria that I'm looking at here's the technical parts for how these uh these organizations are going to receive this money excited to see more of that I can sort of speak to how our office handled this situation because you're absolutely right if we want to reach these smaller communities who maybe are just enchanted with the process or don't know how to engage or where to start or we have a lot of uh challenges to overcome uh if we want to reach them our thought process was okay well then we're going to go to them so we really heavily relied on our District representative team or who we call our Outreach team so our district reps have great relationships in the district they go out there they know the district better than the ledge team sitting at our desks in DC does because they're in it every day so we had very close conversations with the district team about who should we be talking to that's one thing the second thing is we did a virtual open house sort of a webinar that was open to any eligible entity in the district that wanted to participate and learn about this process I think we shared it pretty broadly multiple times we've lasted all of our stakeholder lists for for example local government leadership so maybe mayors of town city councilors if we had their contact information city managers who are a big part of this town managers local sheriffs police Chiefs non-profits we chose to engage with 501c3s so anyone who we had the ability to contact them we had their contact information they fit into the eligible list of entities was uh welcome to join this virtual open house webinar situation where they could just come get online and listen to us speak about our process what we were looking for kind of break down from the bottom what is a cpf what are we even talking about what are these terms that are being thrown around you know there were a couple of articles in the local paper that um mentioned Appropriations and cpfs from the past year so then that drove some interest for this year and we had an hour or so where we were just there and said okay I'm sitting in front of a computer screen I'm going to tell you the basics of our process we shared a four-page background document that had about two pages of explanation and instructions how to link to our we used a Google form I had a link to our form where you could make an application to our office directly but then the second two pages was a table we put together of all of the eligible accounts and which departments you'd be working with we shared that we had a webinar we had probably at 200 or so people participate who joined that webinar and first half was just us talking about the process second half was all q a and we had questions from all kinds of folks about all kinds of pieces of this process right we had the basic I don't really understand what the difference is between a cpf and this thing that I'm flying in with the national mayor's Association what are those different what are the differences there and then we had on the reverse side I have this very Niche project can you tell me where I should apply and and what account I should be looking at we had everything now what was useful in this webinar was not just that we're getting information out there but that we had the entire Outreach District team on on the line we had my entire ledge team on the line and we could listen and hear these live interest live comments we shared all of our information to our constituents I should note this is only open to constituents um and we were able to immediately sort of course correct with some folks who maybe were looking at the wrong thing maybe thinking about this in a way that would not be helpful to them or a good use of their resources and instead redirects them to how to handle these scenarios and we did a lot of one-on-one follow-up and Outreach after that call as well so step one anybody in DC should be talking to people in the district if you're not talking to your District team you're not engaging properly in this process step two make of information available I think that you've provided some really cool ways that other offices have done that we're certainly going to look at some of those examples see what we can learn and how we can grow but for us that was Let's do an open house and then step three was do the follow-up so anyone who got on that open house we did follow up with them hey was that helpful did you need any more information here's the contact information for the district drop that covers your your region here's contact information for the LA who handles that project if you want to talk about it a little more before you make a decision um out of that about 200 or so people who join the webinar I think we had a at least one touch with about 400 people from that email blast saying here's the webinar if you want to join about 400 people had expressed interest of unique projects many of those had come to us with four or five project ideas and they were like which of these do we do um and of that we helped people go through this process cut it down significantly to only isolate people spending their time in resources to apply for things that really Matt the eligibility criteria and then we took it through the more formal process thanks tell them here yeah I'm Jeff Edelstein so this sounds like I love all these different ideas here and it and it verging towards what had been done at some municipalities um which you may be familiar with called participatory budgeting where actually the money is allocated for each district New York City is now doing this I believe in every Council District a billion plus dollars and the community actually develops the project ideas forms teams and then the community actually votes on that now I don't believe if I heard you write that any members are actually giving that authority to communities to their constituents and I'm sure there could be some interesting political Dynamics around that um but I'm curious what your thoughts are on this moving in that direction and particularly around this idea of getting people engaged in democracy where they're actually voting on how that money is being spent and I'll mention just lastly I believe in New York City because this is outside of the regular electoral processes um I think different council members can choose like ages of who votes on those projects so in some cases I think it's like anybody 12 and up so it's actually a way to get younger people engaged in democracy um and so I'm just curious your thoughts you know you know and to take this one step further and then you'll have to pull the mic away from me um and maybe this goes more towards Lars with technology where does AI come into this in the future you can ignore that part of the question no certainly that's certainly one of the challenges you bring up here is sort of the awareness and differentiation of these constituencies to understand uh Community Project funding versus the programmatic funding or the the 99 of federal funding versus the one percent and that there's a lot of nuance there so sorry I want to just put that up there I personally I can't wait to see a chat GPT written your Mark's request it ought to be fun I'm sure we'll see some good ones in this upcoming year um but also on the participatory budgeting question I think absolutely there's there's a really interesting parallel there and I think some offices uh in places where there are participatory budgeting processes happening locally are certainly learning from a lot of the ways that the the PB folks are are doing are having a lot of successes and also running into some pitfalls for me I think the the important distinction there is and this is I I will admit a little bit um inflected by by the PB process happening in my hometown I'm in Cleveland Ohio right now um a lot of the advocates for Pb want to talk about funding that eliminates the role of elected officials so saying hey for you know constituents making that decision themselves but I think for for Community Project funding there is that dialogue between the constituent and the elected representative so I think is really interesting there is that it is kind of flattening that relationship so it's saying constituent to elected representative here's how I want to be involved in these decisions about how our district is setting up our 10 to 15 projects um but there's no way to kind of take the member out of that process for Community Project funding ultimately it is the members decision and there's a lot of the member gets to decide the priorities um and how they're going to prioritize between the different requests there so I think there's there is a distinction just in the language between the two groups there's the language that the PB folks are using where you hear them say you know all spending decisions are made by old white dudes in corner offices um and we're seeing how that is not the case for the earmarks process that these offices are being so Innovative and how are they bringing different voices into the community I will just note my boss looks at every request and it's her making decision at the end of the day you know staff is doing a ton of work on the front end to make sure she's only looking at a binder of 100 requests that made it to that point um things that we've checked off as like meeting all of the necessary pieces from the committee but at the end of the day it is the congresswoman making that decision and that's that's hugely important and I think a a big part of this that's different from sort of setting that aside for a second a big part of this is different than the participator participatory budgeting side of things is you're not just looking at something from a you know Community to community spending level you're looking at something from a community to federal spending level so there's also sort of Beyond just an eligibility test and does this meet the basics and does the community want it you have to look at this sort of political viability test as well right my member can submit the request that she wants that doesn't mean that the committee is going to take them or that the Congress is going to vote on them so I think there is also that piece of the member having to do that calculus and be representative for the committee or excuse me for the community thinking through okay these are both great requests if I have two in front of me that are by all accounts equal one of these is going to be accepted by the committee the other I know committee members will object to now which one do I go with so I think there is that part of the member Community dialogue where the member is really taking an active role that's different than on the local level and we had a question online that I'd like to bring Allison in on one of the growing pain issues potentially is that there were many recipients that did get funded that haven't actually received those funds from the federal agencies there may be some awareness but it's hard to say maybe and this is a question about what the Congressional officers know but um some of those funds haven't been received what is the situation why is that the case sounds like a growing pain question how can we move through this so yeah no and um that's actually something we expect and it's an important aspect of this for the recipients to understand and some of it has to do with you know the program that they're getting the funds through and what the rules are for that program um you know if there are application materials other kinds of vetting that need to be done you know if there's legal reviews or environmental reviews or other things those reviews often have to happen before the funding moves to them it may also be two or three year funding meaning that the agency has a certain number of years before it must obligate those funds in which case from an agency resources perspective it may be prioritizing moving the one-year money first because that has to get out the door otherwise it becomes unavailable to the recipient but these are all like communication challenges at the heart of it is is helping the recipients understand expectations around when they should receive the funds communication with the the agency as to whether there are any barriers to the receipt of those funds and those are issues that we're really going to be looking at now that sufficient time has passed that that we could really understand has money not moved to the recipient it for reasons you can anticipate um or is there some sort of administrative hurdle that needs to be addressed I will just put in one plug for the the reports that we've got out there we do in each of the agency reports break down in a graphic sort of the funding and how long by program just from a legal perspective recipients can expect to sort of wait to receive the fund so you can see if your program was kind of a one-year you know you should have received the funding by the end of fiscal year 22 if it was three year if it was no year so if recipients have questions about that they can go look at the report for the agency that they should be receiving their funds from and at least have some expectation of timing right and that's on the web it's tracking the funds so and I think we have a queen to one quick question oh thank you so much this has been really interesting and I've learned a lot from all of you um it it also strikes me that this has implications for intergovernmental relations and so I'm wondering when these Grant requests are coming through are they mostly coming from constituents or advocacy groups with within the district or whatever as opposed to from the mayor's office or the county or even if the state is involved in it so how much of it is separate from those other governments and also it would include tribal governments there as well and how much of it is coming from um just constituents organizations I'll start here um you all may have better data than I do because mine is largely anecdotal and just what our office experienced I think we probably got about two-thirds some sort of other other governmental entity and then one-third from like a non-profit um now when I say other governmental entity I wouldn't say just mayor's offices I would say that probably includes the state universities which are technically non-profits but I think a lot of folks would put them in sort of that governmental State Association [Music] Ben um we had a lot of Engagement from local governments that came to us from someone like the flood director who wanted to talk about how to maybe improve a flood wall and if if that was a viable project through one of the Army Corps accounts that was open I think that's a really unique way to be looking at some of these members of local governments who are dealing with Niche issues rather than just the cities or the towns General priorities for the year so it's about two-thirds to one-third with the caveat that that two-thirds is maybe a little closer to the people than one may think and I was the plug-in for my colleague Zach corser who's on the first panel but we're going to be doing a a report coming out in the near future and we'll kind of do a little bit of the breakdown of where requests came from so we'll get a more analytical assessment of some of that so thank you very much yeah um any last words from anyone I very much appreciate being on the panel but I just love any thoughts on what you where you think this is going in the 118th Congress so I'm gonna start yeah uh I say that this is an article one power it's explicit in the Constitution I think as we move into the 118th Congress you'll see a lot of opportunities and interest from Members particularly on the health side about exercising their various article one Powers whether it be an oversight or with more direct control over the budget and Appropriations process so I'm excited to see what comes next and I can tell you congresswoman Henson will be engaged can't tell you about the rest yeah likewise I think one thing I am particularly watching is um is the new members coming in right now I talk about an incredible challenge you're setting up a new office you're Staffing up two offices you're hiring all of your people and by the way congratulations here you have to start your earmarks process too um but that's that's also where there's so much energy and that's where there are new ideas drawing from other community uh you know things that are happening in communities so I think that's we're going to see a lot of innovation and again I'm just hopeful that there are more structures to kind of spread that Innovation among offices that can benefit from it you know what I'm tracking at the moment is the conflict between especially on the Republican side members who are fine with this new earmarks process and members who are more fiscal conservative we're very annoyed but earmarks have returned it seems at the moment that they're okay with this process existing but it's looking like in the 118th Congress there's going to be allowed contingent who are going to be fighting against these new measures the entire time yep food and yeah and I'll just say I think um at GAO we're looking forward to the fact that sufficient time has passed that we can really roll up our sleeves now and try to understand um the progress that these projects are making um and to make sure that our communication lines are open not only with the Appropriations committees but with any of the senators or members offices who are interested in any of the observations we might have on um what's going well and what can be improved right again thank you very much for being on this panel it's very informative and uh look for further uh look for further information from the bpc in the coming weeks and months so thanks [Music] foreign [Music]