New York – A Type Of Pork That Might Be Desirable And Kosher

New York – At at a time when governments at all levels find themselves in dire financial straits, the concept of eliminating what is commonly referred to as “pork barrel” is high on a budget-cutter’s to-do list.

In a revealing interview with Yosef Rapaport of Hamodia, two highly-respected Orthodox experts, representing many of our interests, discuss the numerous misconceptions about special earmarks – or “pork.”

Rabbi Shmuel Lefkowitz is the Vice President for Governmental Affairs at Agudath Israel of America and Mr. William (Willie) Rapfogel is CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.

We now have new winds blowing in the fifty states. It used to be a problem for politicians to call for cuts in spending. Today, if they want to be popular, that’s what they have to do. And the first thing they go for is the “pork barrel.” Do you think this is the wave going forward, and all programs are in danger?

Mr. Rapfogel: Well, over the past year and a half or two years, we experienced the most devastating budgetary period in the 20 years that I’ve been doing this job. The State [of New York] eliminated member items funding last year, because the governor was unable to reach an agreement with the legislature. Instead of working to preserve programs — that he himself admitted to me and to other people were necessities — he chose to not let them happen, out of pique against the Senate and the Assembly. And then, in December, he chose to give out member items of his own. Some of them were to worthwhile groups, true, but one was for $5 million to the Superbowl Committee for the New York/New Jersey Superbowl that’s going to take place in several years. I think what he did was the utmost in hypocrisy and ended up costing services for a lot of people.

Getting back to your question, I think the president of the United States in his State of the Union message acted very un-presidential by saying that he would veto all earmarks. He should have said instead, “There are good and there are bad earmarks. I will veto a bad earmark that’s sent to me by a Democrat and I’ll sign a good earmark that’s sent to me by a Republican.” This would have demonstrated bipartisanship and leadership. Unfortunately, he capitulated to the trend sweeping the country about the evils of earmarking and member item funding.

None of us here is going to suggest that we should have earmarks or member items that are wasteful, inefficient, or in any way fraudulent. Please note that “pork” is wasteful by definition. However, we know — and Shmuel [Lefkowitz] is certainly an expert on this — that this is the most efficient, effective way of reaching people in the communities, those communities that are represented by legislators who have the power to earmark funds.

It is a shanda that people who provide services that are desperately needed are placed on the defensive by the attacks on earmarking.

Rabbi Lefkowitz: I think it has become politically expedient and politically correct to bash earmarking, but these earmarks provide services to people, starting with the affordable housing that I was involved with at SBCO. Without earmarked funds, we would never have been able to put a project together. The federal government has programs, the state has programs, the city has programs — but they all have lots of requirements, while we’re trying to save families before they become homeless. We have been able to use earmarks for that goal. We’re also training and placing people so they shouldn’t have to go on welfare. We’re training people for careers so that they can get off welfare and Section 8.

This is money that is saving the state money.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of “pork.” If Congress votes for subsidies for corn; for real pork; for sugar in Florida, that’s not “pork.” But if a member item is pushed by one Congressman or by one or a few members in a state legislature, that’s “pork.” How would you define “pork”?

Rabbi Lefkowitz: There are at least three categories of “pork” [in government financing of programs]. One category is capital, money to build things, or to add things to a building. Those are important, but they’re not critical, not life or death, not something that’ll make a difference in the world. It’s important, and if you can get it, it’s very nice. That’s capital pork.

Then there’s the pork you just defined —subsidies for corn and for certain industries that have traditionally gotten help. That’s a second kind.

The third kind is what we’re talking about. The services to people that are not being funded in other ways. This includes affordable housing, this includes food for people who need food or other help, this includes career training and placement in jobs. It can include mental health services. It can include services for at-risk children, like “Our Place.” It can include things that are needed to help people so that they don’t get into worse shape, that prevent drug addiction. This is what we’re trying to achieve.

Mr. Rapfogel: I would add another kind of pork that people tend to forget about, and that is the for-profit entities. It doesn’t happen very much on the state or city level, but on the federal level it happens a lot, particularly in terms of military contractors. When they have a contract to produce military equipment or computer hardware or software and their project has an overrun of $200 million, the federal government doesn’t want to pay that. It’s left to the members of Congress from their district and state to find ways to come up with the money. That has often been derided and probably is the real meaning of “pork barrel project.” The late Robert Murtha, who was a congressman from Pennsylvania, was one of these “Kings of Pork” because his district did so well with these military contracts.

But that’s very, very different from providing people with food and the kind of social services and career counseling and job training that Shmuel is referring to. We’re referring to kinds of services that have great accountability. Every one of the contracts that Agudah has, that Met Council has, is given as a member item, but then it has to be translated through a city, state or federal agency into an actual contract with milestones and deliverables and the types of service you provide. So it’s not just the legislative branch but the executive branch and the agency that are accountable for what you’re doing with those funds. And if there’s ever a time when the services that are supposed to be provided from these member items and earmarks are not provided, the executive branch is just as much at fault.

You may recall that a couple of years ago there was a bit of a scandal, and the mayor was asked at a press conference what he thought about the member items in the City Council. And he said, well, it’s unfortunate about this particular scandal, but 95 percent of these member items provide vitally important services. It took courage for the mayor to say that at a time when it was unpopular to do so. And it continues to be unpopular.

I think he deserves credit for not trying to identify member items and turn them into something evil, like so many other politicians and editorial boards have done.

But there is an aspect that specifically affects the frum community or the kosher community, if I may use the term. If the government would try to consolidate the grants and give them just to one agency, that could eliminate specific programs designed for one part of the population. Can you discuss how your services are needed by our community because they’re designed specifically for us?

Rabbi Lefkowitz: Yes, here’s an example. We train people to become accountants. Our students won’t go to a public college. Also, most are married with children and have jobs to support their families. Since we cater to this population, we designed the program with evening and Sunday classes and classes on legal holidays.

I’ll tell you a story. We give classes on the Fourth of July. The state didn’t believe we do that. They said, “We’re going to come down to inspect [if that’s true].” I said, “Absolutely, come down and inspect us.” What do you think? The guy never showed up, because he was off for the holiday!

But we give the course based on the needs of the people, including the schedule. Some of our students don’t have high school degrees, so we first them get a high school degree.

And chassidim?

Rabbi Lefkowitz: Yes, let’s say job placement. We can’t send our students to a New York State agency.

You have to sell the person. You have to tell them, “This is a Chassidic person, yes. He looks different, yes. But he’s brilliant, he’s had such-and-such experience; if you hire him he’ll do a bang-up job. He’s honest, and he’s going to be on time. He’s got a family to support, so he’ll take the job seriously.

You have to do certain things. Obviously, our senior citizen centers serve glatt kosher food. What are you going to tell a senior citizen — “You have an option. You can go wherever you want.” But there’s no kosher food for him there.

Masbia couldn’t access kosher food. Why not? Because the city doesn’t provide.

Then there is the issue of affordable housing. An available studio apartment someplace in Manhattan is not going to help us. We need an apartment with several bedrooms. We fought the battle for larger apartments, and believe me, if we weren’t there fighting for it, it wouldn’t have happened, because to the government, studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments are good enough for people who need help.

And senior citizen programs … When you go down the line, we make the difference.

I also want to mention that some of the discretionary or member items in the budget are being used to help the yeshivos get what they are entitled to. We have a large staff helping the yeshivos. Not every yeshivah has an expert on staff who can handle all the government paperwork. They can’t afford it. But in our workshops they find out how to manage a problem with buses, or a problem with how to be in compliance with mandated services. We help the non-public schools access what they’re entitled to.

Mr. Rapfogel: We do very much the same thing. We provide about 15,000 households with kosher food every single month. There would be no way of doing this without the member items — so-called pork — on the federal, state and city levels. We’ve been able to get funding through legislative initiatives or member items, but we need to expand our kosher food pantry network.

To give you an idea of the scope of what member items have helped us do, in the year 2000 we were providing about 250 families with mostly non-perishable groceries every month. To go from 250 to 15,000 households, and many more at Pesach time, has been extraordinary. Collaborating with Masbia, we’ve been able to quadruple its size, so that there are now four free kosher restaurants in the city of New York. It’s unfortunate that we have people who need this help, but we have to be there for them as a community.

In addition, while we have people in the frum community who are poor and eligible for Medicaid, Section 8 and food stamps, we also have a remarkably high and, I believe, disproportionate number of families and elderly people who are what we call the “near-poor.” They are not eligible for government benefits, training programs or other types of assistance because their income is a just bit too high.

Earmarks and member items enable us to provide services without means testing. We can include such people in our training programs, like the one for electronic health records experts, which is now a fast-growing area, so that they can get decent jobs. They wouldn’t get that training otherwise, because they aren’t eligible for the voucher or subsidy to take those classes. But because of member item funding, we’re able to do it for them.

So there are many different ways to help people become independent and improve the quality of life in the frum community, and member items and earmarks enable us to do that.

There is a proposal right now from Governor Cuomo to totally eliminate member items. Do you think that our community in particular should be alarmed at this prospect?

Mr. Rapfogel: The governor has not proposed eliminating them, but he hasn’t allocated any funds in his budget for them either. Which — let’s be candid — is a negotiating tactic. In other words, he knows that in the budget process the legislature is going to say, “Well, we don’t want to do this and we don’t want to do that.” And he’s going to say, “Well, I must have that, this is my priority.”

At the end of this negotiating process, if the legislature agrees to do some of the things that he’s asking for, he may then agree to do some of the things that they would like to do. And that might be member items.

But I would agree that if, in fact, there were no member items again this year, it would have a devastating impact both on the clients who are served and on the non-profits that are doing the serving. Some non-profits have had to lay off many people. We ourselves laid off 17 people in the past year. There’s no question that you can’t replace overnight the dedicated people that you built up over a decade or two.

Rabbi Lefkowitz: We have to change the message. By calling it “pork,” you’re making it sound non-essential. Yet we’re talking about important services that people need, that the non-public schools need, that senior citizens need, affordable housing that families need, career training and placement to support a family — these are needs. It has become politically expedient to bash it. We have to change that. That’s what we’re here for.

Mr. Rapfogel: This interview and this discussion are only a beginning. We hope that the media will take note of it, that they’ll pay attention, that they’ll see that this is something that has more than one side. Instead of a vilification of earmarks and member items, we hope they’ll discover that in fact important things are happening through these programs.

Maybe they’ll take a closer look at the programs and decide that what we have to do is a better job of gauging which programs are effective and which programs are not. To save money, let’s fund the programs that are effective and efficient and let’s not fund those programs, whether they’re military or otherwise, that seem not to be efficient.