Our Views: Tough stand on new pork
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Pork-barrel spending is getting a rhetorical facelift in the early days of the Jindal administration. Instead of the slush funds of old, legislators are submitting requests for grants to “nongovernmental organizations.” While not all the requests are accounted for yet, they’ll easily get into the range of $50 million or more.
It’s amazing how fast $40,000 here or $90,000 there can add up.
As with the old slush-fund grants that governors used to trade for votes with legislators, not all these requests are bad things. Many are sought by legislators from rural areas, where the tax base is limited — but the reality is that many of these grants were of great political benefit for legislators. Their efficacy for the public was too often a secondary consideration.
One good thing the Legislature has done, in part because of prodding by then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco, is to make the requests public in a timely fashion in the House Appropriations Committee, which is still studying the governor’s budget request and the NGO grants submitted by legislators.
Now, Gov. Bobby Jindal has stepped in with a strong statement that the administration does not want NGO funding to go through the roof.
In a letter to leaders of the budget-writing committees, Jindal set out several criteria for NGO appropriations, including their relevance to the mission of state agencies administering the grants, and “statewide or substantial regional impact.”
The latter can be somewhat ambiguous, but we applaud the governor for setting some markers on what ought to be in the state budget bill.
Jindal said NGO grants not meeting all the criteria in his letter “will be vetoed.”
Those are the magic words.
The governor’s line-item veto has, for political reasons involving vote-swapping, for years been very sparingly used on the slush-fund grants.
Jindal is right to state at the beginning of the process that he will use his veto pen. We hope the public will hold him to this promise.
This is a commendable beginning, and we hope the Legislature will take note.
While no one will say all these grants are wasteful, they should not be on state government’s tab unless they have a direct relevance to state agencies’ missions.
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