PoliticsAside Special Edition: Appropriations with the Porter Team

Happy Appropriations Season! In this special edition episode of PoliticsAside, Congressman Porter is joined by our bipartisan team of experts to cover what you need to know regarding the federal appropriations process.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to politics aside this very special edition today, we're talking about appropriations and the process that goes into the federal process of appropriating projects through US Congress and through the U.

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S.

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Senate and then on to the White House.

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There has been a lot of conversation about appropriations through the years but I want to start with what it used to be called and that was earmarking now what is air marketing and this is where we ought to start.

0:30

And I'm gonna read this so I don't mess it up.

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The phrase has agricultural origin farmers would cut recognizable notches in their livestock ears to mark the animals as belonging to them and in most basic sense to earmark is to flag something that's special.

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So in practice it really means funding a project.

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So it's been called earmarks, the appropriation process.

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It's been called congressional e directed spending.

0:58

And today the common wisdom is it's called community project funding now.

1:05

Plus congressman as they come up with terminology but it sounds good.

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Community project funding person.

1:12

I think earmarks.

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Project funding has have gotten a bad rap.

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There certainly are opportunities within the federal process to to fund different projects in communities that the rest of the country may not like.

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But my perspective is when it comes to funding projects, a member of Congress or the U.

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S.

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Senate knows far better where a lot of these money should go than someone in the administration.

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So today we're gonna talk about the process of of appropriating, what does it mean?

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Cameron Gresh with our team is our senior director at Puerto group.

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Tell us about it.

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What does it mean?

1:48

How does it work?

1:50

So really, we're just getting into the very beginning of the appropriations process here in March, which is the typical time that Congress starts soliciting applications for this type of funding.

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What is going to happen over really the next month is member offices will solicit projects from their constituents, organize them into lists of what they feel is most beneficial to their district or most comm competitive overall and then submit those lists to each House and Senate appropriations subcommittee.

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This is usually completed by april to May of any given calendar year at this point, going from May to about september both the House and Senate appropriations committees separately work on drafting their own.

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Sometimes minibusses, sometimes omnibus appropriations packages that include submissions from each subcommittee.

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Once each chamber has a bill that they're happy with, they voted off the House floor.

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Or excuse me, the House or Senate floor or sometimes chamber can choose just to as the Senate did last year directly start conferencing with the House without passing anything off the floor after Congress has a bill that it is happy with which you usually occurs sometime in fall of any calendar year.

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Passage of that legislation occurs usually before christmas, although for fy 23 passage did not occur until March, but we're looking at about a 9 to 12 month process from submission to committee passage to enactment into law.

3:26

Now, that's just the beginning of using congressional congressional project funding after this, it can be anywhere from 2 to 3 months to even 6 to 9 months to get the guidance from whatever agency owns the account you're pulling your CPF out of about what you need to do in order to receive your money.

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It usually involves answering the same questions you answer months ago to your member just to make sure that you didn't miss anything and that everything's on the up and up.

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So from submission to receipt is anywhere from 12 to 18 month process.

4:03

Thanks Cameron, We appreciate that with this also Stephanie walker, some of you may know he's our senior vice president with the porter group Stephanie, So tell us the difference between these different funding processes, what does it mean?

4:15

And so people can understand that are on the call.

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Right?

4:19

So everyone, you know, we're talking about appropriations, which is the general process that the government has to do to fund all of their programs.

4:27

Right?

4:27

So you have the budget, that's kind of the overall numbers and then you have to, that's what they're authorized to spend and then they want to get into the minutia of that to the appropriations process.

4:36

What everyone's talking about these days is community project funding or CPF funding, which is the politically polite term for earmarks.

4:45

This is what we're all talking about here, Marx had been back now for the last two cycles, so you know, folks are starting to get the hang of them and figure out what, what's the difference now.

4:57

earmarks were very popular and successful throughout the, the odds that the 2003, about 2010 when they had, they were removed at sort of the will of the people because there were some pretty high, there was a couple of high profile scandals.

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It's not to say the entire process was totally corrupted, but there was a couple of issues particularly there was, there was a bridge to nowhere.

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Everyone talks about that kind of ended the process with a bang where a bridge and I will not name the state won't call people out a bridge was earmarked somewhere and it they, something happened that they couldn't complete it.

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So it doesn't go anywhere.

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Just a bridge sitting in the middle of nowhere.

5:38

And this kind of was the end of the earmark era.

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So ultimately what happened over sort of the next 10 years is that line item spending decisions was relegated to the executive branch and Congress is not making the project decisions, someone has to take the projects decisions.

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So the executive branch was doing that either through the authority, they already have or through a grant process, which some people apply for the money and get that kind of thing.

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so this past few years, congress has decided they want to take back the spending rains, they want to line item projects.

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But you know, there's a lot of awareness on making sure that the same corruption didn't happen again.

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The same issue.

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I want to call it corruption.

6:22

That's not really fair.

6:22

The same issues, scandals didn't happen again.

6:25

, so they have a lot of new rules now that are different from, from the past used to kind of be, how involved was that?

6:33

If there was a project that you thought was important to your district, you kind of said, this is it, this is the money I want and there's some, but not many guardrails to that.

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You can kind of do whatever, you know, whatever you want to be close to.

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Now.

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The rules are pretty tight.

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not only there's a transparency rule across the board which did not exist before.

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So every member has to say what they asked for, not just what they got, they have to disclose what they asked for and who asked for it.

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So that's a big deal because that helps keep people in the light.

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also across the board, both the Senate and the House and limited these Cps to public entities and nonprofit entities and some offices have other limitations to protect themselves to make sure that everything's on the up and up and then finally, and I think most most salient lee is now that the earmark earmark funds can only come from certain parts and those, if you're getting an earmark from a pot, you have to meet all of the requirements you would already have to meet to apply for a grant or receive that money without an earmark.

7:43

So it's basically just circumventing a bureaucratic process, but you can't become eligible when you were not originally eligible and it's not new money for your for that project.

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It's money that already existed that you would have been able to compete for.

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But your member is saying they don't need to compete because identify this as a significant project for my constituency.

8:08

So they should receive this money, they are eligible to receive it.

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So there's a lot of restrictions on it to make it more transparent and sort of eliminate the risk of scandal because there really was minimal abuse.

8:22

But anytime you take this large number of individuals, in the process, you know, back in through 2001 in 10, were those years, there weren't nearly as many guidelines as you mentioned, Stephanie.

8:38

So Mr Rosenbaum Bannon's our vice president as well with the poorer group and with your experience, steps experience in cameras experience, but with yours, what should should people be asking for?

8:50

How does what's a priority to to a member of Congress and what's a priority to the community.

8:57

Yeah, So I mean two steps point a lot more guardrails now, We kind of have limited, but as she mentioned, we're looking at public entities.

9:05

So municipalities, counties, public agencies, transportation and infrastructure, those types of things.

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community development, education, those are some of the areas that are kind of the big ones, and then nonprofits as well.

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A lot of folks who sort of operate sort of some of those social services to help with communities in need.

9:27

That's also a major focus.

9:29

But you know, sort of taking a snapshot of the last couple of years when you look at the types of accounts and where funds have been pulled from the most requested, highest, highest profile requested.

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areas of focus was on natural resources in the environment.

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Water is a major issue, on all parts of the country and some places it's too much water, other parts, it's too little water.

9:52

So conservation efforts flooding, those types of things are things that communities have to deal with.

9:58

It's not something that is often been able to be accomplished just at the state or local level, but there is a federal aspect to it.

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And I think that's one of the things that we try and stress with folks who approach us on these issues is is that you have to make, what is the federal nexus, why does the federal government need to be putting resources to support something that this member may want.

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And so, you know, infrastructure projects, I think are a really good example of that.

10:25

It's it's a way that you can sort of talk about that.

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This is not just helping people get from point A to point B, it helps with commerce, it helps with improving safety in the community.

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And so you have to kind of build that narrative as to why this project is important, and why it deserves taxpayer investments, just to give folks a little sense in the context of all this, You know, we're not talking the federal budget is in the trillions of dollars.

10:50

the amount of money That is part of congressional directed spending is less than 1% of the overall federal budget.

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and that was something that was an agreement between the chairs of the House and Senate appropriations committee that they would limit, they would kind of put an artificial cap on the amount of money that would be set aside for congressional directed spending, apart from the rest of the budget that funds our military, the state department, all these different programs that we utilize.

11:20

And I'm glad you you talked about what does it really mean to the federal budget?

11:24

Yes, it's it is a lot of money, but in the scope of things, but it's an easy target, you know, for adversaries or for, you know, certainly someone that's supposed to maybe what a particular senator or congressman is doing.

11:38

But now again, with the guardrails, it's it's really far more transparent I guess on that.

11:45

You you touched upon some public projects man?

11:47

Well, I'm gonna turn it back to Mr Gresham, you know, one of Cameron's expertise is in the area of communities, municipalities, counties, cities, etcetera.

11:58

So what does this mean to the public entities, Cameron, thank you.

12:04

Really.

12:05

I think that the greatest value that any community could pull out of community project funding is if you look around there are no shortage of road waste water or clean water infrastructure projects that a city councilor county commission might be working on CPF projects are CPF request, pardon me, are an excellent way to help get phase one or two of a project started so that you can carry that momentum forward and finish things out.

12:35

CPF funding I think is really helpful to local governments, particularly in the water and road infrastructure spaces.

12:43

You're also going to see a lot of utilization out of health care and law enforcement related accounts and I would say together those are the four most common types of CPF requests that you might see out of any given city, but you're going to hear members of our own congressional delegation and others talk about kind of that last mile funding.

13:03

Community project funding is not designed to completely and totally pay for a brand new highway or road network or sewer substation but it might pay for the planning and design of that substation that you haven't even begun on yet.

13:17

And we're looking for ways to fund crossing a funding gap or helping you bridge any fiscal gaps in your budget or what CPS excel at and to Cameron's point on this about the, you know, that it is not all encompassing, it's not a blank check.

13:31

many of these accounts and for folks who have been through the federal grant process, it can be quite complicated, but there's oftentimes regulations already set in law for how those those funding streams operate.

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some there's oftentimes a local share requirement even with the CPS.

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So, you know, not unlike a federal grant where there may have to be some local buy in.

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There is a requirement on many of these accounts and they all kind of differ depending on, you know, if it's Department of Education versus the Department of or the E.

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P.

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A versus the D.

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O.

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T.

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You know, they all have their own different regulations and requirements, that that may be required, but there is the need for some kind of local buy in as well.

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and not just the dollar amounts, but there's a, you know, as as Congress brought these CPS back just a couple of years ago, there's a new requirement for for a demonstration of community support.

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So an agency that may be requesting something of a member's office.

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They and the committee both want to know that this is supported not just by the people who are gonna get the money directly but from the community at large.

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So oftentimes will work with, you know, another, you know, the county, govern if it's for a city or will work with a community partner, a neighborhood association or some type of nonprofit group that understands why getting that money to fill this project might be, might be beneficial and how it will impact the community.

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And I think that that's something that really does kind of build these out and two steps point, bring them into the light and and provide a little bit more transparency when you have to demonstrate community support.

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So the four of us have had the honor of serving in some capacity within a public service And you know, we listen to communities, whether it's an airport or a county or a convention authority, you name it or a school.

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These entities, as a rule do have normally support staff that can help.

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But now there are smaller cities of course that don't, but let's say we're, we have a constituent that's in humboldt Iowa or Boulder city Nevada.

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, that is not, is not on the government City council, but there are community that that person has an idea.

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What can they do, what can, what can the average joe do to be able to see that some projects get funded this way, I throw it out there for the team here.

16:03

So I would first say selfish like it get some help on it.

16:09

it's there a little complicated as as I think Ben and Cameron alluded to its programs that already exist but you know, unless you are someone who is very familiar with the grant space being able to piece together, hey, am I eligible?

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What was my match eligibility?

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Is there an entity that I can use to get a match because that's something else by the way those exist.

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so that we could match your match basically.

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those are questions that you know, people like porter group but also other organizations, other entities know how to do that.

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They can help you do.

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And I think one of the best most important pieces of advice for navigating this process.

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I could give is to start early and ask questions early, Get into your congressional office or seek representation in january in february now but you know, get started because that's how you can get your questions answered.

17:03

And to Stephanie's point, I mean it's it's that early process, the planning ahead thinking through some of these projects, you know, in some cases these have to be kind of pre vetted some of these projects and the transportation space, I'll add there is a question, it's it's specific to some of these accounts.

17:20

Is this part of the state or regional transportation improvement plan, meaning has it gone through sort of this budgeting analysis to determine that it is a priority for the region or the state and that's just a box that the committee asked folks to check so that they have a sense that, oh, it's not just a project.

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Someone drew on the back of a napkin, handed over to their friend who is a member of Congress to get funded.

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It is something that has gone through some kind of public vetting process.

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and two steps point, you know, getting in and having these conversations with members of Congress.

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It's one thing to submit a request to a member's office.

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It's another for it to then become a project that they then submit to the committee.

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And then it's another thing for the committee to decide it's worthy of being funded and for it to survive the whole process from it.

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You know, that that form that you fill out to the Member's office for to get signed into law by the president and then to be administered on the back end to Cameron's point by that agency who would then be administering the funds.

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So it is a long and lengthy process.

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There's a lot of little hurdles along the way.

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but to make sure that you at least have have first done your homework and provided a good project just to the member's office that you're submitting to is step number one and you know, if I could include and you both touched upon it, Members of the House of Representatives of the House of the People, and certainly that we have the Senate of both sides.

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But this is what re elections process is about.

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It's about serving the community, serving the public.

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And I have found that most members of Congress, again, I include the Senate in that as well, will help you.

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So let's say that you're, you're not, you know, the, city of a million people and you have a community idea and you want to share this with your member of Congress.

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Don't hesitate because the staffing is there and these offices to help you and again, some have paid professional people helping within their, their entities.

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But let's say, you don't don't hesitate to ask a member of the staff will help you have to do the groundwork, but don't don't worry about asking the question because and you can always go back and ask again.

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But on that, let's talk about the politics.

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So,, we have the left, the right, the middle, whatever progressives, conservatives.

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this is 2023, what what is the appetite now from the political perspective of community directed funding?

19:56

So, I worked for a Republican when in Congress, back when I worked on the hill.

20:01

So I kind of take the republican side.

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there's a lot on the republican side.

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It was actually republicans in 2011 who got rid of earmarks, paul Ryan this, this question came up for him and I want to say 2017 and he declined to reinstate them when he was speaker of the house.

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The republicans have sort of repeatedly said that they don't like your marks, they think they lead to corruption, They want to lower spending, They're not for them.

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this is not me trying to call anyone out.

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Republicans asked for much more in earmarks than Democrats in the last cycle.

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They asked, there's not what they were awarded, what they asked for.

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They asked for $20 million Democrats in the last year mark cycle.

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This is according to the Brookings Institute.

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So the reality is that even if you oppose earmarks as a theoretical idea, you don't want to leave money on the table.

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a lot of, and I can tell you, I just know this from inside the conference, most Republican members are in favor of earmarks when it comes to the vote because it was overwhelming.

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It's their caucus votes are not recorded, their voice vote internal door.

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It's overwhelmingly supportive.

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It's not my way of calling people out.

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I just think that there is a difference between there's a perception that an earmark is some sort of swampy backroom deal scenario, but what it really is, is Congress having the power of the purse and doing line item spending, which is their constitutional authority.

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So republicans no matter if they say they don't want them or do want them or if they really don't or do what you don't want is for there to be funds available for your constituents, your local governments to fix their roads, whatever they wanna do.

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And you say, I'm gonna leave it on the table and I'm gonna let the guy from the state next to me get that those funds.

21:55

So it's one of those things where, you know, despite there being some, some bad politics on the right, it doesn't really make sense not to participate, which kind of keeps the program healthy on that subject.

22:08

I think an underserved community and in another area where we spend, you know, a lot of, a lot of emphasis on individual disabilities in in employment.

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Now we represent cities, counties, airports, defense contractors.

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Chambers, we have quite a diverse group of clients that we work with.

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but we're also very selective.

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But one area that we really focus on as individual disabilities and I guess step while you still have the floor, what are your thoughts for some folks in that community that really need help the most?

22:42

Well, it's interesting because there's a lot of nonprofit, nonprofits out there who do great work for individuals with disabilities and non profits are one of the entities that are naturally eligible for quite a few federal funding pools and therefore for the CPF process.

22:59

there's also been new money recently that's going into this area because there's been a big push toward sort of modernizing programs for people with disabilities.

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So there's a lot of opportunity to take advantage of these programs and to uplift the the the the disabled community, whether that is tools for employment, whether that is transportation, whether that is healthcare, so there's quite a bit of opportunity, I would say.

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And I think right now it's it's been a bit underutilized.

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So hopefully it's something that picks up.

23:29

Well, thank you.

23:30

Thank you, Stephan Ben, Sorry, I was picking on Steph since she had her mic was turned on.

23:36

But you know, we were talking about politics and what does it mean?

23:39

And thank you for your thoughts, Stephanie Ben, what's your perspective on the politics of all this?

23:45

Yeah, well, it's no secret.

23:47

you know, I can say this from the left, I worked for a Democratic member of Congress, a couple of them on the hill for 15 years nearly, and democrats like to spend money, but they like to spend money on things that they make a difference that could be debated.

24:03

But when it was democrats who brought back earmarks a couple of years back, and some will make the argument that they don't want elected bureaucrats in the agencies to decide where the dollars are going.

24:15

But for many, it's because it's this is a way to target those dollars to communities that may not be able to navigate the process.

24:22

It could, they don't, you know, to the point, I think we've discussed about not everybody's got paid staff who are experts and grants and what have you, but there was some analysis just looking at last year's request.

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And more than one out of every 10 projects that were submitted from a Democratic office was focused on the working poor.

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And about 13% of the projects targeted either programs or things dealing with poor or working class americans.

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And I think that's an indication compare that to around 3% for Republican Republican requests.

24:56

but that was a way that the democrats were able to target some of these dollars into underserved or underrepresented communities.

25:03

Also, you saw large, large percentage of projects, nearly 8% that may have focused on racial or minority groups.

25:12

It's same.

25:13

Nearly 8% of projects the democrat requests were focused on young people in education.

25:18

So you can see as they kind of do a breakdown between republicans and Democratic requests, where some of the emphasis is, there was a higher requests, maybe not surprisingly from republicans for rural America.

25:29

and for farming communities, they may represent more rural communities.

25:33

So you start to see, you know that they're trying to direct dollars towards projects or programs that may not otherwise see federal investment.

25:43

Yeah.

25:43

And Republicans to Ben's point requested large dollar projects like infrastructure projects at a much higher rate than democrats, democrats were asking for sort of smaller programs that are kind of community based where republicans are focused on things like roads or sewers or you know, that that kind of larger scale project kind of shows the difference in thinking on community impact technology issue.

26:13

Sorry about that.

26:15

what's gonna happen beyond tomorrow?

26:18

Tomorrow, of course, could be next year.

26:20

But what do you see happening?

26:22

What's the future of earmarks as we see it?

26:26

Yeah.

26:26

Well, as Cameron pointed out, we're kind of in the midst of the beginning of this season.

26:30

we are expecting to see guidance as soon as maybe this week or next week from House appropriations Committee will come see what types of changes with the new Republican majority that they want to make and what, how they want to earmark this process, I guess.

26:45

and and then that will kind of kick off the process.

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We've got the President's budget that's due out in less than a month, that will help to dictate kind of where the broader appropriations committee's efforts will go.

26:56

The Senate will also be engaging in this process.

26:59

We could be getting guidance from them soon.

27:01

Members are going to start sending out their forms and start filling things out and getting those requests in and engaging with the offices to make sure they're fully briefed on what these projects are.

27:10

But then it's the big question mark is, but with a divided government with a house that's Republican majority, that, that has a lot of thoughts about, about the way the administration and democrats had operated the Congress the last few years with a democrat slight Democratic majority, but a Democratic majority all the same in the Senate.

27:29

Will they be able to reach an agreement on an appropriations bill by the end of this fiscal year?

27:34

At the end of september?

27:35

And Cameron mentioned the timeline, we typically are passing these bills in an omnibus fashion or minibus fashion at the end of the calendar year, but Congress is supposed to be done with this work by the end of september, if not we face a government shutdown.

27:50

We've seen this happen in the past now.

27:52

It's not always these community funding projects that are the focus of those fights between democrats and republicans.

27:59

that wasn't the case last year as well.

28:01

You know, there were fights over a lot of other issues, but with a debt ceiling issue hanging over, you know, a cloud hanging over Washington.

28:09

and a determination by congressional republicans to limits spending.

28:14

You saw a lot of folks who were added to the appropriations committee from the republican side.

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Many of them were people who did not support the speaker.

28:21

and maybe there were some trading going along there, but they have been, they are determined to see reductions in domestic spending.

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So there's gonna be a lot of debate between now and september on how to reach an agreement to keep the government operating even apart from this entire community funding project side.

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So we have the immediate opportunities open literally today as we speak and more info to follow literally tomorrow.

28:51

there's a clock that's ticking for the year.

28:54

We talked a little bit about the appropriation process.

28:57

I mean you could, you could have a member of Congress support your project, you could have them submit your project and that may not be accepted by the committee or you may be able to via a member of Congress have a project that is accepted by the committee, then it has to be voted on by both houses then actually the formula, but there There's no guarantee then even until the end of the year, right whether or not it will actually end up in in the final bill or whether it will pass and go to the White House, correct?

29:31

That's correct, yeah.

29:31

I mean, it was the end of almost right before Christmas when they finally reached an agreement and pulled the bills together, gave us the final text which included the fiscal year 22 community funding projects.

29:45

So yeah.

29:47

And I know we need to wrap up but I was asked today by a community.

29:51

Well, if I a city if if I'm not if we're not able to get it finished in the next three weeks, our request because it takes some homework on what it is and what you know what you need it for.

30:03

Well, can we just do it next year?

30:05

And I guess I want to leave everyone with that we don't know what's gonna happen next year.

30:11

We do know this year that the foundation is laid for an opportunity for many of you on this call to request community directed funding.

30:22

don't hesitate.

30:23

Don't be bashful.

30:24

Ask your member of Congress and and meet with their staff and find out.

30:29

And I don't care how big how small if you don't ask, you're never gonna know.

30:34

And I guess my last question, how much was was allocated and funded in in this process last year?

30:42

Into the country.

30:43

Yeah.

30:43

So just shy of 5000 projects were funded overall.

30:48

and the total number was around $9 billion dollars for community directed spending.

30:55

Our community funding.

30:57

Community project funding.

30:58

Congressionally directed spending.

30:59

Yeah, so just shy of 5000 projects in all 50 states in the territories.

31:05

and just shy of $9 billion which again, a little a little under less than 1% of the overall federal budget.

31:12

But do not be bashful.

31:14

And please ask your member of Congress or someone like, you know, our team is there to help.

31:20

But there is a lot of great firms here that do this you know, as a specialty.

31:24

So I want to take this moment to say thank you Stephanie and Ben and Cameron as part of our our team at the porter group.

31:33

As you know, Politics aside as something that we started earlier in the year and that is to have an opportunity for people in the audience to ask questions or even follow up later.

31:44

But my goal of politics aside really is to provide an opportunity for all of you to meet some of individuals such as the team here today that are really making a difference in the world.

31:55

I'm proud of this team and proud of what we do and and proud of all of you for being a part of the community.

32:00

So with that I just remember all we ask is that you have enjoyed the program and that you are able to sit back and put politics aside just for a few moments.

32:11

So thank you all all the best from Washington D.

32:14

C.