Sign Of The Times: Congressional Appropriations Assignments Are No Longer Coveted

As the story goes, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 asked Sen. Kenneth McKellar, then the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, to quietly provide $2 billion for a secret weapons lab, the Tennessee Democrat had a brief and quick response.

“Mr. President, I have just one question. Where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it?” McKellar said, according to congressional lore about Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a key part of the Manhattan Project.

It was just one instance among countless cases on Capitol Hill where appropriators — the lawmakers who hold the prized positions closest to the federal purse — found a pressing national priority fitting in neatly with local interests for economic development and the jobs that come with it.

From the funds longtime appropriator John P. Murtha, a Democrat, funneled to his hometown of Johnstown, Pa., by locating the National Drug Intelligence Center there to the federal dollars Harold Rogers, a Republican and now the House Appropriations chairman, steered toward the anti-drug nonprofit Operation Unite, which he helped found in his southern Kentucky district, the appropriations story has been one of political clout executed through the federal spending process.

That’s why legislators such as McKellar and Murtha would have been shocked at the decision Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, made at the start of the 113th Congress, when he gave up the chance to move up the seniority ladder on Appropriations for a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee.

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