The taxpayers' trough

Hollywood's movie about a pig didn't fare as well as some thought it would at last Monday's Academy Awards. But in Washington, the political game of Babe continues to waste our tax dollars on pet projects that demonstrate to voters certain members of Congress still know how to bring home the bacon.

Citizens Against Government Waste has published its "1996 Congressional Pig Summary." In a town where bipartisanship is often hard to find, when it comes to spending the people's money, there is nothing like pork to make politicians see eye-to-eye.

To define legislation as pork barrel, Citizens Against Government Waste used one or more of the following criteria. To qualify, the legislation had to be requested by only one chamber of Congress, not specifically authorized, not competitively awarded, not requested by the president, not the subject of congressional hearings, or it had to greatly exceed the president's budget request or the previous year's funding, or serve only a local or special interest.

These narrow criteria produced a booklet full of outrageous examples of misspent money-more than $12.5 billion in procedural pork larding up the eight appropriations bills that have been passed. Nearly $10.5 billion of this was discovered in a defense bill that bucked the otherwise downward trend.

Some examples. The sum of $395,000 was added to the Department of Agriculture appropriation for "rice modeling" at the universities of Arkansas and Missouri. In testimony, USDA officials protested to the subcommittee that funding for the project had not been awarded competitively. Citizens Against Government Waste wondered whether Uncle Ben, not Uncle Sam, should be funding this research.

Consider the $3,054,000 that went for shrimp aquaculture in Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and South Carolina, even though the money was never requested by the president or specifically authorized. An internal USDA audit, obtained by Citizens Against Government Waste, details abuse by one of the grant recipients, the Oceanic Institute of Hawaii. According to the USDA inspector general, the institute "did not comply with federal regulations or with the terms of the grant agreements."

There's the $4,058,000 that was added to the agriculture budget by Senate appropriator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) for projects in his state. And $9,891,000 was tacked onto the same budget by the Senate for projects in the state of Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.). Included was $1,555,000 for the Center for Water and Wetland Resources at the University of Mississippi, Sen. Cochran's alma mater.

Of the more than $10 billion in pork augmenting the defense budget, $15 million was added by the Senate for research and development of electric vehicles, despite concerted private efforts to create a commercially viable electric car. Five million dollars was added in conference for "the instrumented factory for gears." According to Army officials this was not a high-priority item. And the Senate boosted brown tree snake research $1 million. The brown tree snake, found only in Guam, has not been discovered to be life threatening to humans, nor does it have the ability to survive in North America.

To the energy and water appropriations bill was added $4 million by the Senate for aquatic plant control through the Army Corps of Engineers. The administration and the House had concluded that funding for this program would be handled best by the 13 individual states affected by the problem.

While overall funding for the foreign operations appropriation declined $1.5 billion from fiscal year 1995, pork-barrel spending increased by more than $22 million. Included was an additional $19.6 million from the House for the International Fund for Ireland. According to the bill that created the fund, "The United States government has identified two priorities in its contribution to the fund: job creation and the leveraging of additional investment into the economy." In the past, notes Citizens Against Government Waste, this program has used American taxpayer dollars for a golf video and pony trekking centers.

The organization singles out two Florida Republicans-Sen. Connie Mack and Rep. Ron Packard-for special praise in producing a pork-free appropriation for the legislative branch. But most of the booklet shows that when politicians tell us the budget has been cut to the bone, they have barely sliced through the skin of the overweight sow known as the federal government.