Waste & Abuse Pork-o-meter Shows Cash Value of Political Pull
Posted April 15, 2002
By Sean Paige
insightmag.com
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has released its annual compilation of congressional pork-barrel projects, suitably titled The Pig Book. It's filled with the usual fare — a sampling of 8,341 earmarks totaling about $20 billion slipped into fiscal 2002 appropriations bills, in circumvention of the established budgetary procedures, by politicians hoping to curry favor with constituents (some of whom somehow fail to see that they're being bribed with their own money). That's a 32 percent increase in individual earmarks from the previous year, according to CAGW, constituting a 9 percent increase in overall pork spending at a time of rebounding budget deficits and urgent national-security imperatives.
CAGW's little pink book highlights such ludicrous federal spending "priorities" as $50,000 for a tattoo-removal program in California, $450,000 to restore chimneys on Cumberland Island, Ga., and $273,000 to help counter the influence of "goth culture" on Missouri teen-agers. It also provides an illustration of how the power of the purse strings ebbs and flows according to committee position and the waxing and waning of political clout.
Not surprisingly, senators occupying senior positions in Congress or on appropriations committees — Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), former majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and current Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) — brought home a disproportionately large share of the bacon.
But if one considers the case of Mississippi, which ranked third highest in per-capita pork spending in the last full year that Lott was majority leader but fell to sixth after control of the Senate shifted to the Democrats, one sees more clearly how position and pork correlate. In another illustration, South Dakota jumped from ninth in per-capita pork in fiscal 2001 to fourth in fiscal 2002, testifying to Daschle's increased influence and the appointment of that state's second senator, Democrat Tim Johnson, to the Appropriations Committee.
In an ironic twist Byrd, who as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee brought his state a staggering $388 million in pork projects in fiscal 2002, has of late been engaged in a test of wills with the Bush White House over what the senator portrays as a matter of bedrock fiscal principle. He has been demanding that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge testify before Congress on the subject of homeland-security spending; the White House insists that Ridge is not a Cabinet officer and so cannot, constitutionally, be compelled to testify. In a letter refusing Ridge's compromise offer to provide a "briefing" to senators rather than formal testimony, Byrd cited the Senate's "critical need for formal public hearings of the Appropriations Committee on matters involving public funds" as the reason that Ridge must testify.
Yet the senator's insistence on accountability and adherence to procedure stands in sharp contract to the stealthy, unaccountable methods he's employed to abscond with more than $1.1 billion in pork since 1995, according to CAGW's tally. Have formal hearings been held concerning those public funds? Of course not. All of which suggests that Byrd's sudden interest in fiscal accountability and responsibility, vis-à-vis Ridge, is more about partisan politics and the Washington power game that it is about high fiscal principle. |
