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Pork comes in all shapes and sizes, some well hidden, some blatant, some justifiable, some of it as silly as a study of the drinking habits of fish. The 1992 federal budget is well larded with as much as $97 billion of pork, which can be reasonably defined as everyone's money spent for the pleasure of a few. Here are some of the goodies Congress piled aboard the spending train for this year:
This is the really awful kind the obvious, laugh-out-loud kind, the kind that seems so brazen that an ordinary person could never imagine it being approved. Steamtown, for instance. Or Lawrence Welk's museum. Then there was the rehab of President William McKinley's in-laws' home, studies of whether tequila will make fish drunk and why the Hatfield-McCoy feud got started, and a couple million dollars to build a native Hawaiian canoe.
Usually the dollars are relatively small, but they can add up. The year's best example may have been Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens's sty-in-the-sky, a plan to harness the energy of the aurora borealis in a scheme that makes Star Wars look like a high-school science experiment. The project was supposed to turn the huge voltage of the northern lights into electric current. But no one, including the people in charge of the experiment, think it would really work. This year's tab: $25 million for a supercomputer for the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
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At the deep end of the money river, these are the traditional sort of colossal public works projects that get built not because of need or usefulness but because of power. Bills are still coming in for the little-used $2 billion Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway, a dig bigger than the Panama Canal which attempts to duplicate the Mississippi River a few hundred miles to the east. Everyone agreed we'd never do anything like that again. But what's this? Snaking its way through Louisiana is the half-finished $2 billion Red River waterway which attempts to duplicate the Mississippi heading west.
Transportation provides another pot for legislators to score big-money, big-status projects. Billions of dollars are spent annually to fund suspiciously underused mass transit systems-like a train in Buffalo that's so expensive it would be cheaper to pick up commuters each day in a limousine. Some of the most coveted funds are for so-called "demonstration projects, " intended to be experiments in transportation, but in reality just goodies to be doled out to the favored few. For instance, one might reasonably ask what principle is demonstrated by building a four-lane highway "to eliminate traffic congestion " in a remote part of West Virginia. The answer is that it demonstrates the power of Robert Byrd, senator from West Virginia, chairman of the appropriations committee, and perhaps the most adept pork barreler in the history of Congress.
The biggest welfare queens wear overalls and have hairy arms. Last year, Congress handed out to farmers direct subsidies worth more than $5 billion. (The budget for Head Start programs is $2 billion.) In simple terms, and there is nothing simple about "ag " subsidies, the government sets a guaranteed target price and if the market price drops below this, the taxpayer makes up the difference. The Wonderland quality of this system is that it encourages farmers to overproduce, which further drives prices down and forces the government to buy more of the crops. Which encourages the farmers to overproduce ...
Congress's solution: give the farmer money to not grow crops. This has worked well. According to Congressman Harris Fawell, by 1990 the government had paid to shut down about 60 million acres, about the size of three midwestern states.
The result is billions of dollars in higher food prices to go along with the billions of tax dollars paid out directly to farmers. Take the case of peanuts, which have been protected since World War II. Supply is restricted by only allowing goobers to be grown by those who had licenses in 1941 and by sending out squads of peanut police to make sure that's the way it stays. Imports are also curtailed and prices guaranteed. Needless to say, many peanut farmers are wealthy men. But consumers, Fawell says, pay an extra 40 cents on a $1.79 jar of peanut butter.
Or consider another World War II legacy, the temporary honey program which was started to encourage production of honey as a sugar substitute and create a supply of beeswax to use in waterproofing combat equipment. Now, 46 years later, honey soaks up almost $200 million in annual subsidies.
Or milk. There are twice as many dairy farmers producing twice as much milk as the country needs. Thanks to the government, farmers know they can make a profit milking cows, which is why every farmer has some and why, in the mid-1980s, the government had to pay farmers a billion dollars to kill the excess animals. The cost to the consumer: up to $2 billion a year.
Brazen political spoilsmanship that only a handful of members can get away with. The best example came from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senator from New York who treats the grubbier business of the Senate the same way he would treat a beetle discovered in his salade Nicoise. He even chides his colleagues for their pork tendencies. So it was somewhat surprising when, several months after the highway bill had passed, The Washington Post discovered that Moynihan had stuck his own huge piece of pork right in the middle of it. He felt the federal courthouse in Brooklyn was too crowded and the General Services Administration (GSA) was dragging its feet building a new one, so he inserted a $450 million paragraph mandating that everyone's gas taxes be used to build his courthouse.
Of course, one reason the GSA may not have had the money to accommodate Moynihan was because of all the other buildings they're told to put up, including two courthouses for Bobby Byrd, and an office building named for Los Angeles congressman Edward Roybal, who heads the subcommittee that funds these things. There was also what's known around Washington as the billion-dollar boondoggle, a giant federal office complex under construction on Pennsylvania Avenue just down from the White House. At a time when Washington was floating in private office space and the federal government was supposed to be shrinking, the government was building the biggest structure since the Pentagon. The man behind the plan as well was none other than Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
These are the programs that, once started, will never die. Many date to the New Deal and others to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Why, for instance, does the TVA, which makes a huge profit, still take $135 million of federal money? Or the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), another well-intentioned New Deal program that long ago completed its mission of bringing electricity to practically every farm in the country? But since REA needs a reason for existence, it's now bringing subsidized telephones and cable television to those same homes-at a cost this year of $270 million.
But at least these agencies can claim some accomplishments. The Johnson-era Economic Development Administration (EDA) was intended to help depressed rural areas, but "depressed " and "rural " quickly got defined to include 80 percent of the congressional districts in the country. EDA became a little piggy bank for weird projects, including a 20-acre "water theme " amusement park in Beaumont, Texas, and grants to companies in New London, Connecticut. Mostly the agency gives out loans, an amazing 40 percent of which aren't repaid. But every president since Richard Nixon has tried without success to take the piggy bank away. And although it topped Budget Director Richard Darman's hit list this year, EDA turned out to be one of the big winners, with a hefty boost in funding to $250 million.
Another big winner was the woefully managed Small Business Administration, which also traces its lineage to the New Deal and has been denounced by critics as diverse as David Stockman ( "a billion-dollar rathole ") and Common Cause magazine ( "an empty paean to the free enterprise system "). Despite a few notable successes-it supposedly gave Federal Express and Apple Computer their seed money-the agency has been a mire of scandal, patronage and waste with no mission other than what its congressional masters decide they want doled out in given year. SBA lends money to shaky businesses based on congressional clout and the default rate is an unsurprising 30 percent. The 1992 bottom line for this agency which doesn't understand the bottom line: an 80 percent budget hike to $837 million.
Despite his attacks on "little carping liberal Democrats " and their "pork barrel bonanzas, " President Bush had plenty of his own in the 1992 budget. He also cut none out. Although his budget request targeted hundreds of wasteful programs, he and Budget Director Darman made no serious effort to eliminate any of them. As one appropriations committee staffer noted, "How could he try to cut anything with a straight face when he was putting his own in? "
The president's pork was often double-edged: to get his, he had to let others get theirs. Consider a Bush pet: the $40 billion to $100 billion manned space station which opened the floodgates to outrageous projects throughout the HUD/VA appropriations bill. The same thing happened with the $10 billion superconducting supercollider, the atom-smashing race track near Fort Worth that makes Bush's Texas cronies happy as rancheros at a pig pull, but also cost a bundle of new water projects to buy the cooperation of Sen. J. Bennett Johnston and Congressman Tom Bevill.
The highway bill provided an interesting case study in this president's prerogative to change his mind. Lucky for him he never actually said, "Read my lips: No new pork. " When the bill was first introduced Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner gagged at the almost 500 pork projects - perhaps an all-time record for a single bill. They were to be paid for by a sly increase in the federal gas tax. With White House approval, Skinner went on the warpath and told Congress it was heading for Veto City. That was, until Bush started dropping in the polls. Suddenly Bush started thinking like Bobby Byrd: any spending is good spending. Skinner, a pragmatist like Bush, got the message quick and shut up. The tax passed, the bill passed and the next time anyone heard from Skinner was when he went to Texas for the signing ceremony.
If you thought that universities were above the grubby business of begging for federal favors, you thought wrong. Pork tied to research grants is one of the fastest growing types, soaring from practically nothing ten years ago to at least a billion dollars this year. The schools who benefit tend to be small colleges in strategically placed locations-the congressional district of somebody with clout. Wheeling College in West Virginia, Byrd's home, has gotten tens of millions of dollars for NASA research to develop something called the "classroom of the future. "
And the money comes from strange places. The Pentagon, for instance, will have to pay more than $100 million for research of questionable value, including funds to put a submarine in an Oregon museum and to breed fish in Hawaii. Sen. Sam Nunn, who sees himself as the sober guardian of the Pentagon, was outraged when he discovered the funds. "This is not the way the process is supposed to work, " he hollered.
Of course the Pentagon itself is the biggest pork bonanza of all, a virtual Iowa county fall of grunting sows. For most of the congressmen in America, their hearts told them it was time to slash the bloated military budget, but their heads told them, Whoa! We're talking about jobs here! New weapons in the budget included an air-cushion amphibious landing craft and the Osprey, a $25 million-a-copy combination helicopter-plane the Marines apparently want but the Pentagon had been trying to kill for three years.
Amazingly, the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who genuinely seems to want to cut spending, said it had enough stuff. Remember the array of aircraft in the war with Iraq? The U.S. used only 10 of its 57 fighter wings for the whole war. The war showed the clearest proof that we didn't need more weapons. But more got bought because some congressmen wanted them and deals were cut. The Ohio and Michigan guys wanted the M-1 tank; the Pennsylvanians coveted the Osprey, and so on.
"The choices we're making aren't about jobs back home in the district, " Cheney complained in one speech. "It's not about how much pork a congressman's able to deliver on election day. It's preparation for the next time we go to war. "
Military construction, which has its own spending bill, actually increased for the year. And while no one's arguing that the military shouldn't keep up its facilities, doesn't it seem a bit suspicious that so much of the money goes to a few states, and not states with the most bases? The big winners in military construction were Hawaii, Alaska, West Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama-each represented by powerful members of the appropriations committees.
This is an elusive subspecies of the pork barrel which doesn't involve money going out, but rather money not coming in. Tax pork usually comes in the form of what are called targeted tax breaks or, in the slang of the Hill, rifle-shots--so-named for the precision with which they find their beneficiary. Most often the break is a favor to an industry or even a specific company or individual which gets put into the tax code because somebody made a special pleading to a member of Congress who had the power to change the law. And of course in each case, the beneficiary believes he has a great case for why he shouldn't have to pay the tax-as does probably everyone in the country who pays taxes, the difference being that only a lucky few ever find a sympathetic ear.
But one man's tax break is another man's tax bill. Every special break means a dollar not received by the Treasury and thus a dollar that either has to come from someone else, or has to be borrowed. So each favor has to be paid for. In "Showdown at Gucci Gulch, " a dissection of the 1986 tax reform act, authors Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray write of the day Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski sat down at 7 a.m. and started calling key congressmen with a question: " What do you need? " By the end of the day, he'd given away $5 billion in taxpayers' money. A total of $20 billion in special breaks was given out in 1986, then thought to be an all-time record. (But the 1991 budget contained $27.4 billion in special interest breaks, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste.)
There's one more unpleasant item to mention here. Some would call it the biggest pork of all. The budget gurus call it entitlements. And the average person thinks of it as his social security cheek, or his Medicare reimbursement, or his kid's college loan. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars here. You can think of it as pork in the sense that it's politicians giving you your money back to make you happy. The only problem is, they're giving you more than you put in. Medicare, for instance, has come to have the same free lunch quality as all those highways and courthouses Bobby Byrd's handing to his West Virginia voters. But of course, everyone knows there's no such thing as a free lunch. Right? ..CN.-Four Princes of Pork
Robert Byrd Democrat, W.Va. Senate Appropriations Committes chairman has funneled almost $2 billion to his home state In we last two years. In the 1990 budget deal, his greatest extra $100 billion in domestic spending.
Jamie Whitten Democrat, Miss. The longest-serving member of Congress ever heads House appropriations. A disciple of the New Deal, he believes that God Intended no farmer to fall, whatever the cost-which to consumers is many billons a year.
Alfonse D'Amato Republican, N.Y. Ons of the most relentlessly parochial lawmakers in Congress, the wisecracking Republican from Long Island Is called "Senator Pothole " for his ability to score everything from road funds to favors for local banks.
John Murtha Democrat, Pa. The chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on defense is a particular friend of the bloated National Guard. Over Pentagon protests, he saved the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, costing taxpayers $700 million.
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