Clemson Spent $1.7 Million Lobbying Feds

By FITSNews || In a rare example of the mainstream media getting off its ass and doing something useful, Gannett news service is publishing federal lobbying data from the past decade – including taxpayer money spent by South Carolina’s bloated higher ed system on lobbying the federal government (to spend more taxpayer money).

Here’s the cost of this “vicious cycle,” from WLTX TV 19 (CBS – Columbia, S.C.):

Clemson University spent about $1.7 million over the last decade lobbying the federal government, more than any other public or private college in South Carolina, congressional lobbying records show.

Clemson, which is taxpayer-supported, spent $290,000 on lobbying last year alone, the largest amount spent by a South Carolina college or university in one year. That same year, the university hired a full-time Washington lobbyist for the first time while continuing a separate contract with a high-powered lobbying firm, according to congressional records.

Clemson is one of 11 public and private Palmetto State institutions that spent at least $10,000 to lobby Uncle Sam from 2000 to 2009, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Fifty other South Carolina-based colleges and universities either didn’t lobby or spent less than the minimum $10,000 that requires reporting.

Hmmmm … first of all, every dime of public spending should be reported and accessible to the taxpayers (cough, online checkbook).

Second, the University of South Carolina reportedly employs a full time federal lobbyist as well as the D.C. lobbying firm of Van Scoyac and associates (the same firm Clemson uses).  And yet they’ve only spent $800,000 in lobbying the federal government over the last decade?

Please.

If that figure is south of $1.8 million we’d be shocked – and on top of that USC currently employs two full-time state lobbyists, each making more than $100,000 a year (Clemson’s top lobbyist makes over $180,000 by the way).

By the way, we can’t wait to see what “taxpayer hero” Jimmy Merrill (South Carolina’s longtime “vocal opponent” of taxpayer-funded lobbying) has to say about this.

Our suspicion is that the former “GOP” Majority Leader’s proclivity for using your tax dollars as a lobbyist transportation service may have taken his “signature issue” off the table.