Congress has earmarked so many projects at the Education Department’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education that its staff members have almost no time to monitor the projects after they begin, according to a report released today by the department’s inspector general.

In 2005, 15 staff members at the fund, known as Fipse, were responsible for managing 1,202 earmarks, according to the report. The staff members restrained their oversight of earmarks to save time for reviewing the program’s competitively awarded grants, and so each staff member spent only six hours per earmark for the entire fiscal year, the report says.

The report was prepared at the request of Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who has criticized earmarked projects as wasteful, pork-barrel spending that ignores national priorities. In recent years, earmarked spending in Fipse’s budget has skyrocketed, reaching $167-million in 2005, more than five times the amount available for Fipse’s competitively awarded grants, which support the development and dissemination of innovative projects at colleges. In contrast, earmarks are controversial, noncompetitive set-asides steered by members of Congress to specific constituents.

After reviewing a sample of 72 earmarked projects in Fipse and another department program, the inspector general concluded that most were “aligned with the department’s goals and objectives.” However, the department commented that all of its earmarked projects were so diverse that it was difficult to make that judgment about them generally.

The inspector general recommended that the department “develop a methodology to ensure that earmark recipients are held accountable for the federal funds they receive.” In a response, the department said it had been improving oversight but also acknowledged it was faced with an increasing workload but no additional funds from Congress to manage it. —Jeffrey Brainard