The NPR Politics Podcast - Once Derided As Graft, Earmarks Just Helped Congress Pass A Bipartisan Budget Deal

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

The $1.5 trillion dollar package also contained billions in aid to Ukraine. One thing that was absent? COVID relief money that the White House was banking on.And the 2020 Census undercounted many Black, Latino, and Native Americans. White, non-Latino Americans were overcounted. That could help to perpetuate inequality.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, correspondent Hansi Lo Wang, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Nicholas from Moorhead, Minnesota, where turkeys have already taken over the city. This podcast was recorded at 1.35 p.m. on the 11th of March. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I advise that all those who are afraid of birds stay far away from here. All right, here's the show. The turkeys are taking over everywhere. Birds. The birds are back. More birds. We got lots to talk about when it comes to critters as spring starts. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. The Senate voted Thursday night to approve a massive spending package. It includes $1.5 trillion in funding to keep the federal government open. It also includes more than $13 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine. Kelsey, let's start with this government funding. This seems to have been relatively drama-free. Is there a reason for that? Well, some of it is because there was broad agreement that nobody wanted a government shutdown. And the situation with Ukraine actually put a lot of emphasis on making sure they got a full year funding package. The really

short version of why that was important is that if they just kept continuing resolutions, which is basically extending the current funding levels, they'd be extending basically out-of-date funding levels. Funding levels that were meant to be applied to a time, you know, before the current situation in Ukraine and really before any of the current domestic needs were evident. Getting a full year budget through, which in this case really only goes through the end of September, means that they're funding the government at a level that is more in line with the requests from the actual agencies that are operating on the ground. And for Republicans in particular, this meant that they wanted to fund the military at a level that the military says is necessary for

basic operations, which, you know, is an important thing to have going into this potentially lengthy conflict. Yeah. So there is another thing that is kind of unique in recent history in this big spending bill. And it is this thing called earmarks. They're back. Domenico, do you want to explain what earmarks are and why we haven't talked about them in a decade? And now we are? Well, we haven't talked about them in a decade because there was a push. They didn't exist. I mean, there was a push by former Senator John McCain, the late Senator John McCain, who really campaigned on this in 2008 to eliminate earmarks to say, essentially, people are requesting funds as part of larger packages that are not germane to the principal reason for this bill. And, you know, it's easy to understand why people

would say, oh, yeah, that shouldn't be in there. Why are people attaching, you know, half a million dollars for a swimming pool in Massachusetts to a bill that's about funding the government? But, you know, there have some, there were some unintended consequences of getting rid of earmarks. And one of those things in particular was the inability to horse trade, really, to get people on board who might have been sitting on the fence. And it actually, some people believe, contributed to polarization because of it. Earmarks are kind of one of a broader constellation of things happening with this 2,700-page bill. This is something that got largely buried by the absolute onslaught of domestic and global news happening right now, but it's something we should absolutely be paying

attention to and something that I personally will be digging through over the next couple weeks. You know, ironically about this bill, it seems like when you stuff things in and there's less debate, more actually gets done because it's less controversial. I mean, think about all the things that are in this bill in addition to the stuff that we've already talked about. You know, more than a billion dollars for border security funding, hundreds of millions of dollars for dealing with the immigrant visa backlog, comprehensive immigration reform, not something that the Congress is able to really get done when they're broadly talking about it. This bill also has the largest funding for the IRS in 20 years, just as people are filing

their taxes now, you know, and the IRS has been dealing with a big backlog of communications, you know, and they have the same staffing levels since the 1970s, even though our population has been expanding rapidly. Let's move on to Ukraine, just over $13 billion in emergency aid. What kind of things is the U.S. providing with that funding? What does the administration intend to provide to Ukraine? The biggest bulk of this money is about spending on people displaced within Ukraine and the estimated 2 million people who have fled the country since the war began. And it's only been about two weeks. And there's also additional money for food and health care support. On the lethal aid side, there is about $3 billion to support the U.S. military's European command. And there's additional money for making sure that President Biden has the

authority to transfer additional defense equipment to Ukraine and other allies supporting Ukraine. And Domenico, this actually had some amount of bipartisan support. Ukraine is an issue where maybe for the first time in a long time, politics are stopping at the water's edge, or there is a rallying behind Ukraine and the administration's handling of it. Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, we normally hear about a rally around the flag moment when the US is at war. But what we're seeing really is a rally around the Ukrainian flag moment. In our most recent survey, the NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll, President Biden got a bump in his approval

ratings overall. It got a bump in his approval ratings for his handling of Ukraine. There are big majorities of people, four and five, who say that they are in favor of sanctions, the kind of sanctions that are being leveled by the West and NATO allies in the U.S. And that seven and 10 say that they would still support those sanctions, even if gas prices go up, as President Biden has warned about. So we're seeing that real moment of unity to try to combat, you know, Russia's President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And, you know, I think that that I was wondering if that would mean increased defense

support. And it looks like at this point, they've got a green light to go ahead and do that for now. One thing that did not make it into this very big bill is new funding for COVID preparedness for the continuing fight against the pandemic. You know, even as masks are coming off and and, you know, things are starting to resume, the White House had asked for a big chunk of money and Kelsey, Democrats had to pull it out of the legislation at the last minute. So where this stands right now is that it isn't in the bill that is headed for the president's desk. Democrats are promising they will bring up a standalone COVID funding bill next week. But the likelihood is that there is not going to be enough bipartisan support for a standalone COVID funding bill for it to make it through the Senate or to even get a vote in the Senate.

And so what the White House is telling me is that testing capacity will begin to be depleted this month, that in short order, the U.S. supply of monoclonal antibodies will run out, that eventually even the ability to distribute and provide free COVID vaccines may become problematic months down the line without this funding. So they're calling the situation dire. And I wonder, Kelsey, does Congress, and I guess Congress isn't a monolith, but does Congress think this situation is dire? It seems like there might be a mismatch. There does seem to be a mismatch. I think there are a lot of Democrats who agree that it is dire. When I talk to Republicans, they say they want that specific accounting. They want to see when that eventually is going to occur. They want to see, you know, just because money has

been allocated, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's been spent. And they want to see how much money is left to spend, how long of a runway they have. And some of that is political because there are plenty of Republicans who don't think that this money is necessary at all. And there are some parts of it that are just asking for additional accounting. That said, it could become a situation where it is immediate and dire. And it's very difficult to see at least, is that if they don't get the money until that variant is visible, then we're going to have another situation like we did in December where there weren't enough tests and everybody was freaking out and there were unnecessary illnesses. And it's deeply unclear to me how they resolve that.

Kelsey, thank you for your reporting on this. Please do not go too far because we're going to hear from you later in the pod. But for now, let's take a quick break and we will be back real soon. And we're back with Hansi Lowong. He covers the census for NPR. Hey, Hansi. Hey, Tam. So we got a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau this week, and by we, I mean you. And it showed that the 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, and overcounting white, non-Hispanic white people. So what is going on there? Well, this is a decade after decade flaw with how the government tries to count every person living in the country. And, you know,

past research from the Census Bureau suggests that one element here is that there are some homeowners who identify as white and not Latino and have more than one home and end up getting counted more than once. And for people of color, generally, there are higher levels of distrust of the government and a lack of understanding of the purpose of the census. And really, on top of all that, 2020 came with the chaos of COVID-19 and interference from former President Donald Trump's administration. And so what we're left with, according to this follow-up survey the Census Bureau conducted, is that people identified as white and not Latino, they were overcounted at a rate that was almost double the rate of the last census in 2010.

And for Latinos, the net undercount rate more than tripled compared to 10 years ago. And significant undercounting among Black people and American Indians, Alaska natives living on reservations who, for another decade, have the highest net undercount rate among all racial and ethnic groups. And what's unusual, though, is compared to recent censuses, there was a significant overcount of Asian Americans who are usually undercounted or are not representative enough in samples to really say anything really definitive. How significant were the undercounts, I guess, and overcounts? You know, because it can sound pretty alarming and it sounds to some extent like it is alarming. There were probably millions of people, I assume, that were left out of the counts.

But how significant is it and how much will it skew, I guess, the money that's appropriated in various districts? One way to look at it is the Constitution calls for a count of every person living in the country once a decade, specifically to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives by the population. And so when the Census Bureau doesn't have a perfect count, it's not following this constitutionally required mandate. And therefore, we have an equitable distribution of political power in the United States of America. This has been the case from the very beginning, of course, because no U.S. census has been perfect. But if we take a look at these undercount and overcount rates, we see an increase in the net overcount rate for people identified as white and not Latino. And again, this translates into an inequitable distribution of power and money. This is a racial gap. I mean, it sounds like you're saying this is a longstanding problem. It is a problem that

the Census Bureau has known about and, you know, at times has worked to do better on. Obviously, communities have worked really hard to avoid these undercounts. But even still, 2020 sounds like it was uniquely terrible for this. 2020 for the Census was a hot mess. I think that's the short of it. It was just a hot mess. And the Census Bureau, every decade has a lot of challenges. It's a changing population, and a it's a census, a lot of people just don't want to participate. And that makes it that much harder for the Census Bureau and putting on top of that a political climate under the Trump administration, coming after a failed push for a citizenship question, a kind of question that Census Bureau

research shows likely to discourage a lot of Latinos from participating in the census, and a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric. All of this is just not an ideal census environment. How much of this is intentional or accidental or systemic? I mean, you talked about the Trump administration. I think a lot of people remember a lot of the controversy over the census. And how much of this has to do with something intentional versus the pandemic versus staffing shortages, for example, for the Census Bureau to be able to actually knock on doors of places that they are traditionally undercounted? It's all of the above. The census is just such a massive, massive operation.

And it is essentially requiring the participation of almost the entire country. And so all of these factors are contributing to the massive challenge. I think a few highlights or lowlights, however you want to put it, is we can't forget the Trump administration pushed to end counting early. Counting was, the counting efforts were disrupted, delayed, door-knocking efforts were delayed

because of the pandemic. And then just as door-knocking was about to start, the Trump administration announced a last-minute decision. I broke the story. They said, we're going to end counting earlier. That made it so much harder to reach historically undercounted groups who are traditionally counted in a lot of ways through that in-person outreach, that door knocking, that was a major factor. But more broadly speaking, to speak to this systemic, persistent problem of undercounting people of color, it's raised a lot of questions about fundamentally the way the U.S. conducts the census. Is it really the best way?

Yeah. I do wonder how civil rights groups and others who've taken a strong interest in the census, how they are these areas have a recourse? Can these people be counted after the fact? Or is there a fix for the funding or the congressional district lines? Counting is over. And lots of layers to this, which is right now, tribal, state, and local officials can ask the Bureau to review their local community's numbers and check for any processing errors. Ultimately, it will likely not be a real fix for any communities that were seriously, significantly undercounted because processing errors, it's really on the margins. But it could mean a lot for local communities where very small changes can make a big difference.

At this point, congressional seats have been reallocated. Electoral college votes have been reallocated. Voting maps at every level of government have some been finalized. Some of those maps, some of them are being drawn right now. So people are using this data that have these undercounts and overcounts baked into them. It's really right now a lot of focus is about the major funding implications and also about the general baseline understanding of who is living in this country, that there is a hope that the Census Bureau can get as accurate data as possible about the

demographics of the country because it's not just government officials, funders who are looking at this data. It's researchers, it's scientists, it's anyone who's trying to just get a basic understanding of who's living in the country. And that's what's also at stake. And when you speak of researchers and scientists, some of those are survey researchers who actually use the census as something that they wait towards so that when you poll people and call them that you're getting an accurate representative sample, you know, they use those census numbers. So when the census numbers are off, it can throw polls off. Wow. So this could affect our understanding of the political dynamics in the country because we misunderstood because

the numbers are off. Certainly at the margins. And I will say, when we always talk about those margins of error, better pay attention to them. Tam, I would say this has been affecting decade after decade because there have been undercounts

decade after decade. So this is not a new thing. Yeah. Well, Hansi, you know this stuff cold and it is so awesome to have you on the podcast explaining it all. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me back.

We are going to take a quick break, and when we get back, it is time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back, and Kelsey is back too. Hello. Hello. And it is time to end the show like we do every week. My favorite part, Can't Let It Go, the part of the show like we do every week. My favorite part, can't let it go. The part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about or thinking about politics or otherwise. Kelsey Snell, what can't you let go of?

I can't let go of baseball because it is finally, finally about to happen. The 99-day MLB lockout is coming to an end, and there will be an opening day in less than a month. It is very exciting. And I was reaching a point where I was convinced we weren't going to have baseball this year, but I was wrong. And that's great. This is a great thing to be wrong about. I know. I kind of woke up, and I was like, wait, there's going to be baseball? And I don't know. It's just this optimistic, hope springs eternal kind of feeling every time spring training kind of comes around.

It's spring. It's like a new chapter, right? And that's the thing. When it was time for pitchers and catchers and they still weren't done with a deal, it was like, guys, I need something to look forward to. Yeah. Well, you know, and hope needs to spring eternal when you're a Mets fan, because there's not a lot of hope there generally. Yes. As a Cubs fan this year, I'm right there with you. As a Cubs fan for most of my life, I was right there with you. Whatever, you guys won your World

Series. Yeah. And disrupted the universe by winning. Look at everything that's happened since. I know. It's the Cubs' fault. Exactly. My point exactly. It's the Goats' fault. Domenico, what can't you let go of?

I'm just going to read you a few headlines, okay? Giant spiders are invading the East Coast. This is not a drill. Will giant Joro spiders parachute their way into northern states? Large parachuting spiders could soon invade the East Coast, study finds. So apparently there are going to be giant spiders that use their webs like parachutes, apparently, falling from the sky. They're about the size of your palm. They're brightly colored. And they, you know, are going to be landing in our backyards, just like the cicadas.

Speaking of the Cubs winning the World Series and throwing things off, we had cicadas. Now we got these spiders. I don't know. I refuse to engage with the spiders. I know. I mean, there were murder hornets. Then there were cicadas. Then there were the oak leaf mites.

Yeah, those are nasty. So terrible. I forgot about those. They destroyed my summer. So the spiders, they're non-poisonous, I've learned. So that's good. I heard an entomologist on the radio yesterday saying, we shouldn't call it parachuting because that sounds like an invasion. So maybe we should just call it ballooning because that seems more innocuous.

But whatever it is. If you don't belong in my yard and you're ballooning into it, you're invading it. That feels like spider spin. Does that person work for the spiders? He's an unregistered foreign agent for those invasive spiders. We've got the birds. We've got the spiders. Like, what else do we have to deal with? Maybe the bird invasion, they can eat all the spiders and there you go. We can back out of it. All right, Tam, it's your turn. What is it that you can't let go of. Well, I have one bird for you who probably is going to be too busy

holding art shows to eat the spiders for us. A budding birdcasso named Echo at the Maryland Zoo is being trained to do abstract art. Of course, it's pretty abstract because it's a parrot. What kind of art? It's an African gray parrot. They're very smart. The trainers have little cups of paint and there are little sponges. And then the bird, Echo, is being trained to take the little sponge and paint with it. Oh, that's cute.

You know, I think you could call it blot art. Well. Perhaps. with it. That's cute. You know, I think you could call it blot art. Well, perhaps. It's the art that is made by a parrot with a sponge in its mouth. Oh, I'm watching the video on Twitter now. That looks that's pretty like, okay. Okay. I'm not gonna lie. I did at one point in time by greeting cards that were painted by elephants at the smithsonian national zoo at a fundraiser so i cannot be it was a fundraiser for the zoo i wonder if this if these birds have been trained by people who just want these birds to stop talking they have to use their mouth for that's dominico that is some very parent logic there you're like i don't want you to be so quite so annoying go over here and paint something

see that's what i'm saying i think this is a whole ruse if there's anything that parents and teachers have learned how to do is manipulate children. And parrots. And parrots, apparently. But this was an Aisha Roscoe honorary can't let it go because if she was here, she would have a lot of thoughts about this bird. She would think this bird's going to take over. It can talk. It can paint.

What's next? Exactly. All right. Well, that's a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Nathani Maturi. Our editors are Eric McDaniel and Krishnadev Kalamar. Our producers are Lexi Schapiro and Elena Moore. Thanks to Brandon Carter as always. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Pretty bird, pretty bird. Oh, God.