A top House appropriator says a Treasury Department office that enforces trade and economic sanctions against state sponsors of terrorism appears overly concerned about Americans vacationing illegally in Cuba and buying contraband Cuban cigars.

Rep. Jos?? E. Serrano, D-N.Y., an opponent of the Cuba embargo, argues Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has not properly prioritized the threat to national security that Cuba represents.

“People who are perceived to violate certain regulations on travel to Cuba get prosecuted, harassed, investigated, at much higher levels than for any other violation,” Serrano said.

Serrano argues that OFAC — whose mission includes financially punishing state sponsors of terrorism, as well as narcotics and weapons traffickers — has imposed more penalties for violations of policies related to Cuba than for countries such as Iran and North Korea.

The administration’s Cuba policy — a strong adherence to the embargo — has been a flash point during the appropriations process in recent years.

Congress is not expected to finish its fiscal 2009 spending work until early next year, meaning the issue will likely be left for the next president. But the debate over the embargo is not going away and is shaping up as a potential wedge issue in Florida congressional campaigns.

Serrano is the chairman of the House Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees funding for the Treasury Department. His office says it has collected substantial anecdotal evidence about OFAC enforcement decisions but little data. For that reason, he has included a list of 25 questions in the report accompanying the fiscal 2009 Financial Services spending bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee last month, asking OFAC to provide more specifics about its operations, such as how many OFAC employees work full time on Cuba.

The concern over OFAC was sparked in part by a November 2007 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found that cases related to the Cuba embargo made up 61 percent of the agency’s cases from 2000 to 2006, even though the office administers more than 20 sanctions programs. During a similar period, 2000 to 2005, penalties for Cuba embargo violations represented more than 70 percent of the agency’s total penalties.

Treasury Department spokesman John Rankin said the department “appropriately balances our commitment to undermine the networks that finance terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction] proliferation while honoring our legal obligations to enforce economic sanctions against rogue nations such as Cuba.”

According to the GAO report, OFAC told the office that Cuba cases required relatively few resources but did not provide “reliable data” showing its allocations for Cuba embargo cases versus other sanctions cases.

The Treasury Department declined to provide budget numbers for this story but said approximately 90 percent of OFAC’s budget is now devoted to the 20 other sanctions programs that OFAC implements, and that 11 out of 155 full-time employees at OFAC are devoted to the Cuba program.

“We have reduced the resources committed to Cuba and are targeting our enforcement efforts in a more effective way by concentrating on those facilitating illegal travel to Cuba,” Rankin said in an e-mail message.

Policy provisions that would ease U.S.-Cuba trade and travel restrictions have been a regular feature of appropriations bills, but they have been stripped out of the final legislation in the face of veto threats by President Bush.

Both the House and Senate Appropriations committees have approved fiscal 2009 Financial Services spending bills that would ease restrictions on Cuba trade and travel.

Regardless of the likelihood that Congress will be able to do anything about Cuba policy this year, it has been an issue in some congressional races.

In Florida, Democrats have recruited two Cuban-Americans, Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez, who both favor loosening family travel to Cuba, to run for the House against longtime GOP incumbents Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart. Although the Diaz-Balart brothers have benefited from support from fellow Cuban-Americans and have long favored a hard line against the Castro government, they face unusually tough re-election battles.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart believes sanctions against the Cuban dictatorship should be strictly enforced, arguing that the country harbors terrorists, has an aggressive intelligence operation against the United States and shot down two civilian U.S.-registered airplanes in 1996. His opponent, Martinez, countered: “If I am able to go to Cuba and visit with friends and let them know the greatness of democracy, that is the best ambassador that you can have.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., an appropriator whose district includes a large number of Cuban-Americans, has promised to strenuously oppose efforts to ease restrictions on Cuba trade and travel. She has drawn criticism from some Democrats for not endorsing Garcia and Martinez.

Serrano said his efforts to shake up Cuban sanctions are not politically motivated. “If this was the first time I had done this, you might say that,” he said. “This is an issue I have been working on all my 19 years in Congress.”