2010 Education Pork

Accuracy in Academia ^ | April 26, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

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2010 Education Pork

Bethany Stotts, April 26, 2010

The 2010 Congressional Pig Book, released by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is out, and it exposes the considerable pork given to academia.

“Sen. [Tom] Harkin [D-Iowa] has long been a determined crusader for pork,” states the Pig Book summary (pdf). “In a November 25, 2006 New York Times article, he claimed, ‘I happen to be a supporter of earmarks, unabashedly. But I don’t call them earmarks. It is “Congressional directed spending.”’”

Harkin, who chairs the Senate Labor/HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, earmarked approximately $7.29 million “for the Iowa Department of Education” to run a grant program named after himself, the Harkin Grant program, according to the CAGW summary book. “($32,633,000 has been earmarked for this program since 2005…” it states. The long name for the grant program, which funds local school construction projects, is “The Iowa Demonstration Construction Grant Program.”

“The purpose of the program is to help school districts correct fire safety problems and to help school districts leverage local resources to construct new schools or remodel, modernize existing buildings. Approximately 35 percent of the available funds have been allocated each year for addressing fire safety issues and 65 percent for construction,” according to the Iowa Department of Education website.

Here’s just a few of the other education-related earmarks outlined in the 2010 Pig Book summary. (Many more are listed there.)

Sen. Harkin:

* “$400,000 to the AIB College of Business in Des Moines to continue recruiting and training captioners and court reporters and to provide scholarships to students;…"....