This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 7, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Stepping up her campaign against earmarks, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., asked federal transportation officials on Friday to help legislators find ways to free up unspent highway funds in Missouri and other states related to thousands of congressionally directed road and bridge projects that have not been built.
"I am very concerned about the prevalence of unspent or 'orphaned' earmarks," McCaskill wrote in a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, "and the detrimental effect it has had on transportation funding for Missouri and other states."
Because of the way that earmarks are written into law, unused funding for such "orphan earmarks" can't be spent on other projects -- even though the earmarked funds count against a state's share of federal highway funds, which are distributed by a formula based on the federal gas tax collected by states.
The senator's office said the Missouri Department of Transportation has reported a loss of about $101 million in highway funding since 1991 as a result of the unspent funding for earmarked projects.
McCaskill, who has backed efforts to block senators from earmarking favorite projects in appropriations bills, asked the U.S. Transportation Department to "work with me and Congress on a process that will reallocate the orphaned, unused earmarks into formula funding for Missouri and other states that are adversely affected."
Such a process, according to federal agency sources, would need to include legislation to direct the Transportation Department to allow states to redeploy any unspent funds for congressionally directed projects.
Republicans in both the House and Senate have adopted a moratorium on any future earmarks, but the Democratic-controlled Senate recently rejected an amendment proposed by McCaskill and others to ban earmarks.
According to a recent USA Today analysis of federal and state records, at least some money remains unspent for more than 7,300 congressionally directed highway projects, including 3,649 projects for which no money has been spent for its intended purpose. The newspaper reported that about $13 billion -- nearly one third of the highway dollars earmarked since 1991 -- has not yet been spent.
The USA Today analysis, which found that "orphan earmarks" reduced the amount of money that states would have received in federal highway funding over the past two decades by a total of about $7.5 billion, estimated a 20-year loss of $146 million for Missouri and $350 million for Illinois.
In her letter, McCaskill asked LaHood to work with her to find a way to free up the states' access to the orphaned funding so that Missouri can use the funds for transportation infrastructure needs identified by state and local officials. She wants federal officials to work with Congress -- during the upcoming process of reauthorizing the nation's surface transportation programs -- to discard earmarks and allocate money for projects solely through merit and need-based formula funding.
Olivia Alair, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Department, said in a statement to the Beacon on Friday that the department "has a responsibility to work constructively to advance transportation projects specifically funded by Congress."
She said the department "works closely with state agencies to ensure that such investments included in transportation bills for state and local projects are effectively managed and judiciously spent. Still, there are many reasons why a project may not move forward immediately, such as the need to conduct an environmental study or sort out local conflicts on specific elements of the plan."
Alair added that the Transportation Department "does, however, recognize that projects can occasionally reach a dead end, which is why the Department has also taken steps to cancel funding for projects included in transportation bills prior to 1991."
Earmarking in surface transportation legislation has increased over the years from about 1 percent to the current 11 percent of the total amounts authorized, McCaskill said. She said the most recent highway bill included about $22 billion in earmarks.
"Since joining the Senate in 2007, I have worked to put an end to the practice of earmarking because I do not believe that members of Congress know better than those in their state how best to utilize federal funding, and that earmarks further eliminate funding that could be made available through competition or formula," McCaskill wrote.
"The recent reports of these orphan earmarks confirm that this is most certainly the case when it comes to transportation funding."