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The federal indictment against Jim and Chris Hayes, for all its detail, is silent on the government's own role in what it alleges transpired between the Hayeses, their church and the nonprofit center in which they are so central.

LOVE Social Services received its federal money, nearly $3 million, on the recommendation of Sen. Ted Stevens. Using language attached to annual spending bills, Stevens directed the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide the grants to the nonprofit group founded by the former Fairbanks mayor and run by his wife.

Such directions are called "earmarks," and, in the nation's capital, they've grown as ubiquitous as cherry blossoms in spring.

The practice has been the subject of growing scorn by people in and out of government not only for increasing the government's spending but also for frittering away the taxpayers' money.

Stevens, though, ardently defends earmarks and his judgment in using several to direct money to LOVE Social Services while he was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee during the first half of this decade.

Federal agencies often neglect Alaska, Stevens said in a March 1 interview about his role in the situation.

"Someone has to call their attention to a need in Alaska and we do that through this earmark in a 'report,'" he said.

Once the agencies hand out the money, it's their job to monitor it, he said.

"When I was home in Fairbanks, I heard a lot about it," Stevens said, referring to discussions about the Hayeses' program while visiting during the mid-February congressional break.

"A lot of people seem to think I should have paid more attention, etc., etc., and I tried to tell them 'That's not my job,'" he said.

But critics say the federal agencies also seem disinclined to view it as their job when it comes to congressionally earmarked grants.

If accurate, the opposing assertions would seem to leave no one diligently checking on a grant-making system that prosecutors say allowed the Hayeses to misspend at least $425,000 in taxpayer money over the course of five years.

Cascade of criticism

The Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs, through which three of the five LOVE Social Services earmarks came, was criticized in a 2002 report by the Government Accountability Office for its poor record of grant monitoring. The GAO is an investigative agency of Congress.

"Our work has shown long-standing problems with OJP grant monitoring and has begun to raise questions about the methodological rigor of some of OJP's impact evaluation studies," wrote Laurie Ekstrand, the GAO's director of justice issues, in a statement to a House subcommittee in 2002.

The following year, in October 2003, a report from the White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth delivered a report to President Bush that criticized congressional earmarks and said earmarks for programs for disadvantaged youth were "an especially problematic situation." Stevens' 2003 earmark to LOVE Social Services is among the many earmarks nationwide listed in the report's appendix.

"Earmarked programs do not receive the oversight that enables agencies to make sure they are actually helping youth, achieving their goals, and making wise use of limited funds. The earmark process also keeps federal agencies, charged with implementing the statutes, from making funding decisions based on a coordinated, identified need to address a specific problem," the report said.

Another report, in December 2005 from a federal advisory committee, called for the elimination of all earmarks to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the agency that handled three LOVE Social Services grants totaling $1.7 million.

"Besides taking a drastic portion of federal program appropriations, earmarked programs are not held accountable for their effectiveness (or ineffectiveness)," said the report, which was given to the president and Congress by the Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice.

"Because these programs bypass the competitive grant process by going directly to a member of Congress, they do not have to meet performance standards nor demonstrate that they work," the committee said.

"In fact, it is often difficult for federal agencies to monitor earmarked programs as program staff believe they are not subject to agency oversight because their funding came directly from Congress," it added.

Stevens disagreed strongly with such assertions.

An earmark of the sort given LOVE Social Services is not law; it is a recommendation to fund an organization, he said.

"It makes them eligible to participate in the program and in effect urges the agency to favorably consider an application for it. But it is not a mandate. Very clearly it is not a mandate," he said.

Agencies often need that encouragement, he said. "The problem is, they've got expertise but they never go to Alaska," Stevens said.

Stevens acknowledged that Alaska nonprofits and other organizations can apply for grants like any other group in the nation, even without earmarks.

"Oh yeah, you can apply. The question is, do they (the agencies) have anyone in the area that can investigate and determine the validity of it," he said. "If we're going to get any of this money, it's only through earmarks or through somehow or another calling it to their attention."

Despite critics' assertions, the "somehow or another" often involves working with the agencies, said Lisa Sutherland, who served as Stevens' aide for Alaska projects during the senator's tenure as Appropriations Committee chairman.

Stevens, concerned about Alaska's high rate of violence against women, once forced a federal program director to attend a conference with rape crisis centers, she said.

Afterward, the agency "developed a program and they used our earmark money for it," Sutherland said.

"So we do pull the expertise of the agencies in," she said. "That's why he brings all those people up to Alaska in the summer, to show them the things we're working on."

The pressure from back home to provide earmarks is intense. Stevens receives hundreds of requests, and he said he maybe gets one out of every eight or nine he seeks. "We don't dream these up now," he said.

The upside of earmarks

Earmarks are often virtual blessings from on high to nonprofit groups in Alaska.

For example, the senator has directed about $650,000 annually for the past five years to the Alaska Mentoring Demonstration Project, mostly through the same federal office that handled the LOVE Social Services grant - the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

To run the Alaska mentoring project, the Big Brothers-Big Sisters groups in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Southeast Alaska teamed with Boys and Girls Clubs of Alaska and the National Senior Service Corps.

The money was a "godsend," said Taber Rehbaum, executive director of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Fairbanks. It helped bring a mentoring program to about 500 kids in about 30 communities, reaching well beyond the state's urban areas where Big Brothers-Big Sisters has operated for many years, she said.

"That would not have been possible without the expansion money," Rehbaum said. "The suicide rate is such a concern, especially in rural Alaska, and the resources for individual communities - there aren't a lot."

Chuck Barber, a consultant from Eagle River who has helped administer the grants, said the project is truly a "demonstration" because Big Brothers-Big Sisters had never operated in the nation's rural areas before and no one was sure how well it would work.

Costs are higher but evaluations indicate the project is very beneficial, Barber said.

The recent decision by the Democratic leadership in Congress to eliminate earmarks in the current fiscal year budget may kill the federal funding for the project, though, Barber said. So people involved in the project are working hard to demonstrate its success to the agencies.

They may have some lingering resentments to overcome.

"Most of the staff people I've talked to over the years are not fond of earmarks and don't like their hands tied that way," Barber said.

Like them or not, Stevens said, the agencies have the responsibility to monitor the earmarked grants.

"We don't have any investigators on Appropriations," he said of the Senate committee. "I don't have any way of oversight on these things. Oversight is clearly an executive branch function, and we rely on them to do that."

Asked if agencies might have any reason to be timid in their oversight of earmarks, Stevens said "not to my knowledge."

Sutherland said agencies sometimes do defy an earmark. She cited the example of a senior center, not in Fairbanks, to which Stevens sent some money for exercise equipment through a federal agency program.

"It turns out that program only funds operations. It did not fund equipment. So that one was rejected and we had to find another way to do it, which we did," Sutherland said.

The first of three Justice Department earmarks to LOVE Social Services, for fiscal 2002, appears in a funding bill after language that says the Office of Justice Programs "is expected to review the following proposals, provide grants if warranted," and report to Congress on its intentions. It also says that "up to 10 percent of the funds provided for each program shall be made available for an independent evaluation of that program."

Similar direction to the Office of Justice Programs appears, absent the reference to an independent evaluation, for the 2003 and 2004 earmarks.

Stevens said he never saw any such evaluations or reports. That's not unusual, he said.

"We get periodic reports about what they've done," he said. "However, the oversight really is done by Justice, and they would only report back to us if they had a negative impact or any irregularity."

'A perfect example'

In the end, Sutherland said, the agency oversight of LOVE Social Services did uncover the alleged misuse of funds.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development's inspector general looked at some of the LOVE Social Service reports and apparently found irregularities, she said.

"They were involved in working with the U.S. attorney's office in bringing this indictment," she said. "So, if anything, this is a perfect example of oversight working. [The] HUD inspector general found a problem, you have the Justice Department following up, and they're dealing with it."

Justice Department officials have repeatedly declined to answer questions from the News-Miner about their monitoring of the LOVE Social Services grants. A spokesman for the Office of Justice Programs recently declined to answer questions about the grants, noting that they were part of a criminal case.

A spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, through which two of the five congressional earmarks to LOVE Social Services came, said in 2005 that the department's oversight of LOVE Social Services was not up to par.

"I will say that the department has recently tightened certain reporting protocols to more effectively track and monitor the draw downs on the many THOUSAND(s) of these special purpose grants," spokesman Brian Sullivan wrote in an e-mail response to the News-Miner at the time.

Stevens said he had no reason to worry about the LOVE Social Services grants, given Jim and Chris Hayes' standing in Fairbanks.

"I of course never envisioned what we're seeing now, and I'm really saddened and surprised by it because Hayes had an enormous reputation," Stevens said of the former mayor.

Stevens said he and his wife, Catherine, have known the Hayeses for many years. In May of 2003, the senator arranged for Jim Hayes, pastor of Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ, to deliver the opening invocation to the U.S. Senate.

The Hayeses' son, James, worked for Stevens in Fairbanks and Washington, D.C., for about six years starting in 1999, although "he was not in any way connected with that earmark," the senator said.

Stevens said he has not talked with Jim or Chris Hayes since before federal officers served warrants at the church, the nonprofit and the Hayes home in January 2006.

He has not talked to any law enforcement officers about the case, he said. "I haven't, and I don't think my staff has either."

Stevens tends to take the long, broad view of his earmarks and the criticism they generate.

"I've been here all but 10 years since Alaska has been a state, and when I came here there were literally hundreds of programs that we did not participate in because they didn't have anyone looking at Alaska to determine what the needs were," he said.

So he took on that role, and he believes his record has been successful, despite the recent criticism.