Remember Chuck Quackenbush? Barely avoiding a perp walk, Quackenbush had to resign his post as California insurance commissioner in order to avoid impeachment as a philanthropic miscreant. There’s something of Shakespearean tragedy in his story, plummeting from hotshot California state government official to foundation abuser to Hawaiian scofflaw—and now a Florida deputy sheriff under investigation for shooting an unarmed man.
One interesting and not insignificant sub-category of pork barrel spending at the national level involves earmarks to politically connected nonprofits. Some of these are, of course justifiable but some are pure tit for tat or disguised self-dealing. In the wake of a number of scandals involving nonprofits and their sometimes intimate relationships to the likes of Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens, we might have expected some lessons to be learned at the federal state and municipal levels but in some locales nonprofit earmarking does not fare well in the light of day.
