WASHINGTON – Despite soaring deficits, the government spending plan awaiting President Bush’s signature in December is chock-full of special items for industries and communities. Consider $443,000 to develop salmon-fortified baby food, or $350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Lawmakers from both parties who approved the $388 billion package on Saturday set aside plenty of money for projects certain to sow good will in their home districts.
The time-honored practice flourished despite the ballooning deficit, less money for federal programs and rising unease about how the government will finance the futures of Medicare and Social Security.
For instance, there was $50,000 to control Missouri’s wild-hog problem, $335,000 to protect North Dakota’s sunflowers from blackbirds and $4 million for the International Fertilizer Development Center in Alabama.
There’s little mystery about why such spending survives in good times or bad.
“They do it because they can get away with it; they do it because it’s the thing that allows them to do a good press release back home and be able to say to folks, ‘I’m delivering something for you,’” said Frank Clemente, a spokesman for the private watchdog group Public Citizen.
When Bush took office, he promised to cut pet projects from the federal budget, but the president has yet to veto a spending bill. He is expected to sign the new plan as well, once it reaches his desk.
Within hours of the bill’s passage, lawmakers were promoting the projects they had brought home to constituents. In federal budgets, what is derided as pork-barrel spending by one constituency is embraced by another as well-deserved local aid.
Oregon’s senators, Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Gordon Smith, put out an 11-page news release Sunday sharing credit for several hundred million dollars headed to their state. Projects the money will finance include “wood utilization research,” a barley gene-mapping project and remodeling of a cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park.
Alaska Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Ted Stevens claimed credit for channeling federal money to the state’s salmon industry, including the money to research use of salmon as a base for baby food.
“The goal is to increase the market for salmon by encouraging the production of more ‘value-added’ salmon products,” Murkowski’s office said in a statement.
The targeted spending was so prolific that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had no problem filling a half-hour floor speech with examples before the Senate vote on the measure, such as a plan for $1 million for the Wild American Shrimp Initiative.
“I am hoping that the appropriators could explain to me why we need $1 million for this – are American shrimp unruly and lacking initiative? Why does the U.S. taxpayer need to fund this ‘no shrimp left behind’ act?” McCain asked his colleagues.
McCain’s query went unanswered, in part because spending documents don’t identify who proposed each item or why.
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