The Appropriations chairman has built $236M worth of federally funded projects. Rogers's 'empire' under scrutiny

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has funneled more than $236 million in federal funds since 2000 to a web of nonprofit groups he created back home in the Bluegrass State, according to a new report by an ethics watchdog group.

Another group of private firms linked to Rogers and the nonprofit companies received another $227 million in federal loans, grants and contracts during the same period, a three-month investigation by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found.


Rogers’s family members, current and former aides, donors and business associates have benefited personally from the congressman’s largesse with federal dollars, according to the report. For instance, Rogers’ son, John, worked for one Kentucky company — Senture — that received a $4 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security with Rogers’s help back in 2004. Senture, which has now added offices in several other states, announced last year that it would receive contracts from several other federal agencies, including the Veterans Administration and Education Department.

Rogers, dubbed the “Prince of Pork” by his critics for obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks during his 27-year stint on the Appropriations Committee, has come under scrutiny in recent years from conservatives and anti-spending groups — including for earmarking money for a cheetah conservation program where his daughter Allison worked, among dozens of other projects.

Rogers declined to comment on the report.

“Rep. Rogers sits at the center of an interconnected web that includes Kentucky nonprofit groups, a bank he partially owns, and several companies he has supported with federal money,” CREW said in the new report, which will be released on Tuesday. “These entities have strong ties to Rep. Rogers and to each other, and help extend the congressman’s influence in his district.”

“CREW’s research shows that Rep. Rogers’s empire is larger and more complicated than it may have appeared initially, and he’s unlikely to let it wither for want of federal funds,” the report adds. “When the ‘reformed’ Rep. Rogers retains money in the budget for Rural Business Enterprise Grants awarded through the Agriculture Department, he’s speaking in code. Money from those programs, and others at agencies ranging from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Department of Education, has a tendency to flow to the entities in Rep. Rogers’ web.”

Some of Rogers’ controversial pork spending has previously been the subject of investigative articles by national and Kentucky newspapers, but the full extent of those activities has not been fully explored due to the mind-numbingly dense network of interconnections between the dozens of people and groups involved.

Rogers’s influence back home will only grow now that he is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, despite an earmark ban instituted by House Republicans at the start of this Congress and now grudgingly adopted by both chambers, according to CREW. Rogers earmarked more than $250 million in the 111th Congress alone, but he signed onto the earmark ban as part of his successful campaign to win the gavel at House Appropriations from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

The nonprofit groups set up by Rogers comprise an alphabet soup of acronyms: the Center for Rural Development, Inc. (CRD), Forward in the Fifth, Inc. (FIF), Southeast Kentucky Economic Development Corporation, Inc. (SKED), Southern & Eastern Kentucky Tourism Development Association, Inc. (TOUR SEKY), Eastern Kentucky Personal Responsibility in a Desirable Environment, Inc. (PRIDE), Unlawful Narcotics Investigations, Treatment and Education, Inc. (UNITE), and the National Institute for Hometown Security, Inc. (NIHS).

Rogers touts these groups on his official website as having “brought local communities together by revitalizing the environment, providing hope in the fight against drugs, building small businesses and creating jobs by increasing tourism in one of the most beautiful regions of the country.”

But according to Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, “hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to southeastern Kentucky, and it’s not clear for what. It’s not clear what all these organizations really do.”

Another nonprofit, the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., has ties to nearly all the other Rogers’s related groups. Founded in 1968 and backed by tens of millions in federal funds over the last several decades, KHIC now owns more than a dozen for-profit companies and a real-estate firm. While it claims many successes, KHIC has also had some notable failures. For instance, one KHIC-backed firm, Mid-South Electronics, won a $15 million contract in 2005 thanks to Rogers but later moved most of its operations to Mexico.

Jerry Rickett, president and CEO of KHIC, has held other positions at Rogers-tied nonprofit groups, and other KHIC official, Ray Moncrief, has given $16,000 to Rogers’ reelection campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records.

In one previously undisclosed incident, Rogers directly intervened in helping boost a Small Business Administration disaster loan for a marina owner who is also a donor to Rogers’s congressional campaign, according to documents obtained by CREW.

That businessman, J.D. Hamilton, sought Rogers’s backing in dealing the SBA. His company also hired a lobbying firm that employed a former Rogers’s aide and whose employees have donated more than $13,000 to Rogers’s campaign or leadership PAC.

Hamilton’s company, Lee Ford’s Resort Marina, in Rogers’s district, received a $1.5 million loan from SBA after the Army Corps of Engineers lowered the water level on Lake Cumberland in 2007 in order to help save a failing dam. Hamilton has complained the lower water level hurts his business.

With Rogers’s help — including a letter to SBA last July — Hamilton was able to hold a meeting with SBA officials in Rogers’ office last year. SBA then gave an additional $2.5 million loan to Hamilton’s company, and redesignated the firm as a “major employer” in the region.