Grizzly Bear
I’d been wondering for a while what the deal was with the famous grizzly bear DNA study that John McCain thinks is so obviously illegitimate. Christopher Hitchens explains:
John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
The difficulty the McCain campaign has in coming up with examples of pork-barrel spending that don’t turn out to have some justification is indicative of the overall wrongheaded way the current fad for “porkbusting” is thinking about this issue. The general idea with earmarks is that you want to enhance your popularity with your earmarks. With rare exceptions (like the Bridge to Nowhere that Sarah Palin likes to pretend to have said “thanks but no thanks” to), you don’t actually do that by requesting money for totally pointless wastes of money.
The issue with earmarking isn’t that the money generally goes to total waste. The problem is that allocating funds for basic infrastructure or scientific research according to the relative clout of different politicians is inefficient. West Virginia and Alaska wind up with a disproportionately large amount of pork, while New York, which has a low number of Senators per capita both of whom are relatively junior, winds up with disproportionately little. It really would be better if you could take all the money spent on earmarked transportation projects and instead spend that money according to some kind of neutral formula. Similarly with scientific research projects. Reforming the process would, in this sense, be a good idea. But you shouldn’t assume that the projects funded by earmarks are per se wasteful and you certainly shouldn’t assume that procedural reform would or should naturally lead to a reduction in overall spending. In general, we spend too little on basic infrastructure and research and the case for spending more would only be made more compelling by the development of a better process for allocating resources. The National Institutes of Health, for example, is generally regarded as a well-functioning organization. But that’s not a reason to slash the NIH budget, it’s the reason NIH spending is relatively easy to gain support for.
42 Responses to “Grizzly Bear”
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October 27th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
The main problem with earmarks I see is their potential for corrupting legislators. I think the left demeans their importance in large part because it’s McCain’s signature issue, and that’s a mistake.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Side note: “The bridge to nowhere” may have gone somewhere. A blogger from Alaska wrote that, although the island to which the bridge would extend was sparsely populated, it was home to the local airport for a geographical area serving around a hundred thousand Alaskans who have no other form of transportation in the winter months. Access to the island was by ferry, which was often out of service in the winter because of the ice. This could be just another example of earmarks being ridiculed by people who don’t understand local needs. I have no corroborating evidence, but, as you write here, there is usually a reason politicians request earmarks.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
The biggest problem with scientific research funding is that it is often very hard to explain to the layman why the study is helpful. A friend of mine got a grant to study sexual selection in dung beetles. On the surface, a study like this is an easy target for jokes on late night television. It just sounds so silly. But there are real issues at stake. First, dung beetles are critical to agriculture, so it’s important to understand them. But studies of insect behavior also provide great insights into evolutionary biology. Insects go through generations much faster than more advanced animals, so we get to see evolutionary effects much faster (like in the lifetime of the researcher). But few people are willing to look past the title of a study before passing judgment.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Anybody who doesn’t consider the Iraq and Afghanistan wars “pork barrel” for the military-industrial complex simply isn’t serious. Or more precisely, they are simply criminal.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
The earmarks issue also reveals McCain’s Dr. Evil-like notion that $3 million is a significant amount of money in the context of the federal budget.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I actually believe McCain’s true objection is that this is the wrong process for choosing which projects to fund and good-government types back to Bill Proxmire can admire this. but process improvements get no traction in the press so they try to highlight egregious examples of spending.
$3 million on a projector for a planetarium that mostly serves to educate children and $3 million to help protect endangered “megafauna”, a few million to study some aspect of genetics using fruit flies are not so egregious. Instead they demonstrate how ignorant and hostile McCain and Palin are to science. Ideology trumps human progress for 8 more years. I think not.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
it was home to the local airport for a geographical area serving around a hundred thousand Alaskans
Ketchikan Gateway Borough had a population of 14,070 in the 2000 census, and that’s the entirety of the area served by its airport.
Access to the island was by ferry, which was often out of service in the winter because of the ice.
Do you have a source for that? I’ve only been there myself in the summer, but Ketchikan is at the southern tip of the Alaska panhandle. Nothing I’ve read about the area indicates that it would be iced in during the winter with any regularity. It’s much more temperate than the rest of Alaska.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
The other argument against earmarks is that they often involve using federal dollars for something that’s completely local or state in nature. I know Matthew doesn’t believe there’s anything that’s not the federal government’s business, but some of us disagree.
This objection doesn’t apply to the bear stuff, which seems to be for a legitimate federal purpose. But let’s say the bridge to nowhere wasn’t to nowhere, let’s say it was a bridge that Alaskans really needed. Alaskans should pay for it, then.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
The DNA tests reveal that the bears are who we thought they were.
THEY ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THEY WERE.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I didn’t realize anybody read Hitchens anymore.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Why the hell would you build an airport on an island that would be inaccessible much of the year?
October 27th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
the crushing irony of McCain’s use of that particular grizzly anecdote is that the feds (USFWS) were doing those studies to document both bear population numbers and genetic diversity, both in order to justify the Cheney (remember he’s from Wyoming) administration’s pre-made decision to de-list Yellowstone grizzlies under the Endangered Species Act. In other words, out here in reality it’s the cattlemen and the sheep ranchers who wanted Congress to fund those studies so they could get grizzlies un-protected, all so they could get back to having a free hand with the public lands.
Try getting funding like that for projects that might show a project needs to be stopped…
October 27th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Why the hell would you build an airport on an island that would be inaccessible much of the year?
1. I don’t think it is, unless everybody in the Alaska guidebooks and various online sources is wrong and commenter #2 is right.
2. The airport is built across the strait from the town because there isn’t enough flat land to build an airport in Ketchikan proper. The mountains go pretty much right down to the water, so a lot of the town is either built on steep hills or on docks built over the water. Gravina Island, across the water, is a lot flatter.
3. Seaplanes are also common in Southeast Alaska.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I can’t believe I’m the first one to point out that McCain’s opposition to bear DNA research reveals his fundamental unseriousness about defending this country. We need to know all we can about bear biology because:
#1 Threat to America — BEARS!!!
also:
#1 Threat to UCLA — BEARS!!!
October 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
The biggest problem with scientific research funding is that it is often very hard to explain to the layman why the study is helpful.
In MacPalinese: Science is elitist, dontchaknow!
Andrey Kravtsov, Chicago, IL, commented on the “overhead projector” as follows:
I am an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chicago (the University that today has added yet another Nobel Prize winner in the sciences for the US). I would like to comment on Sen. McCain’s statement during the today’s debate that Sen. Obama has earmarked “$3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Ill. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”
The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned piece of office equipment (overhead projector).
The 3 million is actually for an upgrade of the SkyTheater – a full dome projection system, which is probably the main attraction of the Adler Planetarium and is quite sophisticated and impressive piece of equipment.
I find it appalling that Sen. McCain would call a science education tool for public (largely children) for a historic planetarium with millions of visitors a year a wasteful earmark. The planetarium’s focus, as stated on their website (http://adlerplanetarium.org) is “on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science.” Is an investment in such public facility at the time when US competitiveness in math and sciences is a constant source of alarm a waste?
“American’s ability to compete in a 21st Century economy rests on our continued investments in math and science education,” said Rep. Brian Baird, Chairman of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee in Congress, after the passage of The 21st Century Competitiveness Act of 2007.
Considering such investments “wasteful earmarks” today, even in the face of the financial crisis, will severely cripple US economic competitiveness in the increasingly high-tech world down the road.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Unfortunately, it’s probably a moot point whether there is “some kind of neutral formula”, because the smaller states probably wouldn’t buy off on it. That may be just as well, since many of our smaller states would be in a world of hurt had they not been able to steer some Federal attention their way over the years.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
It isn’t necessarily true that pork is less efficient than “neutral” formulas. In order to maintain a viable coalition, formulas are often written in a way that spreads the money too thin. For example, almost all school districts receive Title I funding. This universal formula dilutes the purpose of helping poor students. Spreading some earmarks to a few key districts to maintain political support might actually waste less money. In any case, there is no getting around the fact that it is difficult to maintain support for federal spending that is not geographically dispersed.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
All true. But admitting this would force certain senators to scale back the use of their favorite phrase this side of “Main Street”, the ever annoying “pork barrel spending”. This would be beneficial for me however, seeing as how i want remove my ears when i hear senators(McCain) use this term.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I am going to defend earmarks a little. They can be beneficial, because they are a way of doing things outside of the usual channels. Whenever you hear a story along the lines of “the (bridge or road or whatever) was in really bad shape but after we organized the community and contacted the local Congressman he helped to get it repaired,” you are generally talking about an earmark. If the systems of Government are not working smoothly, or are letting things fall through the cracks, then the Congress needs to be able to do something about it, and sometimes minor tweaks are what’s needed.
Of course, this privilege can be abused and corruption is possible, but this is a useful prerogative.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Wow, one penny from every American man, woman, and child to study an endangered species. How will the union survive?
October 28th, 2008 at 9:11 am
There was an NIH grant several years ago — for a study of sweat glands in Africans — that drove one of our aged relatives into a frenzy. She went off on that subject for 10 minutes during dinner. I think this was pre-Limbaugh, but she’d heard about it from a similar source. McCain knows better, I hope, so it’s all just aimed at whipping up the booboisie. Which is actually worse.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:23 am
The main problem with earmarks I see is their potential for corrupting legislators. I think the left demeans their importance in large part because it’s McCain’s signature issue, and that’s a mistake.
QFT. The actual money involved in the earmarks isn’t a big deal, but they feed the reputation of Congress as a corrupt organization, and produce actual corruption.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I don’t think it’s coincidence that all three ‘egregious’ examples McCain-Palin have been touting on the campaign trail involve science.
October 28th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
“It really would be better if you could take all the money spent on earmarked transportation projects and instead spend that money according to some kind of neutral formula. Similarly with scientific research projects. Reforming the process would, in this sense, be a good idea.”
I think you are very nearly correct, but missing the important point that funding for scientific research and outreach does have an existing as nuetral as possible process to go through. Grants are awarded through bodies such as the NSF, through an open, competitive, and rigourous process. Earmarks short circuit this, and I would much rather that money go into the pot from which people can compete for the funds.
That’s not reforming the process, it’s sticking to it.
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