Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) produces an annual summary of pork-barrel spending that is aptly named the Congressional Pig Book. This year, CAGW’s 2010 Congressional Pig Book Summary highlights the usual litany of Congressional misuse of government funds that have been appropriated by various members of Congress for the benefit of a wide variety of individuals and causes. These appropriations are generally attached to other bills as they make their way through the approval process and rarely see the light of day or are subjected to any sort of critical analysis in a sort of wink, wink, unwritten agreement that “if you vote for my bill, I will vote for yours.” Pretty much everyone goes along to get along, while the public is kept in the dark, unless of course, they happen to be a beneficiary of a particular piece of pork barrel legislation.

CAGW’s Spring 2010 newsletter notes that in 1991, the year of their first Pig Book, there were 546 projects with a total value of $3.2 billion. The numbers this year are 9,129 projects with a total cost of $16.5 billion. Not surprisingly, as the federal budget has grown, so have the number and total cost of earmarks.

This year, to qualify for inclusion in the Pig Book, a project had to meet at least one of the following seven criteria – most satisfied at least two:
-Requested by only one chamber of Congress
-Not specifically authorized
-Not competitively awarded
-Not requested by the President
-Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or previous year’s funding
-Not the subject of Congressional hearings
-Serves only a local or special interest.

The “pork barrel” appropriations included in the 2010 Pig Book were grouped in the following categories:
I. Agriculture: 475 projects, total $396.5 million..
II. Commerce, Justice, Science: 1,510 projects, total $714.4 million.
III. Defense: 1,752 projects, total $10.3 billion.
IV. Energy and Water: 939 projects, total $1.2 billion.
V. Financial Services: 260 projects, total $65 million.
VI. Homeland Security: 173 projects, total $242.8 million.
VII. Interior: 548 projects, total $361.1 million.
VIII. Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education: 1,789 projects, total $813.8 million.
IX. Legislative Branch: only one earmark was requested, total $200,000. (Note: The lone earmark was attached to the Legislative Branch
Appropriations Act, which includes increases for staff salaries, money for parties for dignitaries, and $500,000 for a “pilot program” to send
postcards to their constituents about town meetings.
X. Military Construction: 182 projects, total $1.1 billion.
XI. State and Foreign Operations: 7 earmarks, total $209.4 million.
XII. Transportation/Housing and Urban Development (HUD): 1,483 earmarks, total $1.2 billion.

Last year the Obama administration and Congress added $1.4 trillion to the national debt, more than the total deficit of the prior four years, and U.S. Senator George LeMieux (R-Fla) noted, “Unless Washington’s lawmakers reverse course on spending, our deficits will continue to rise and our nation’s debt will suffocate prosperity…In the last fiscal year alone, Congress gave the State Department a 32 percent increase, the Environmental Protection Agency a 35 percent increase, and most all other federal departments and agencies saw increases well above inflation…The current earmark process is the engine that drives the train. Earmarks have become the tools used to build support for the annual appropriations bills that fund the basic functions of our government. Distracting attention from oversight, members often become focused on how much money they are able to get for their district or state.”

Although this year’s earmarks are a relatively small portion of the total federal budget ($16.5 billion vs over $1.4 trillion), they are symptomatic of what’s wrong with the way our government and the people who run it operate. It’s always about getting more money to spend, never less, and the method of budgeting Congress uses is deliberately designed to produce bigger budgets year after year, forever. Federal budgets are developed using a method that is described as “traditional incremental budgeting,” with departmental managers having to justify only increases over the previous year’s budget, and what has been already spent is automatically approved.

The system is rigged to always provide bigger budgets, never smaller, and no one ever spends less than their budget allows for fear that, if they do, their budget for the next year will be reduced by the amount they don’t use. Unless and until we wake up and change the way we do things, earmarks and spending will continue to grow until we simply go broke, which many people believe will be in the foreseeable future.. At that point, budgets and earmarks won’t matter, because there simply won’t be any money available to spend.

© 2010 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved

Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog at www.opinionfest.com

We all lost last Tuesday. Yes, the Democrat leadership can cheer their victory, and breed hopes for further gains in 2008, but for the American people, in general, the news is much more somber. We all lost last Tuesday. It has become more and more obvious that our system is broken…and that neither a Democratic nor a Republican majority in Congress is useful for the stable governance of the nation.

Our Republican President and our Republican Party have failed us. In the eight years that President Bush has been in office, with a majority of both houses of Congress, they have failed to push for meaningful tax reform. They have all but ignored entitlement reform, even when faced with Social Security insolvency by 2050. President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress have squandered the opportunity to push for meaningful immigration reform, being satisfied with voting to build a border fence, without actually funding it, in hopes that the American People will not notice that the issue is still on the table. Instead of pushing for the rights of the States to decide for themselves on the issue of a woman’s right to choose abortion, they have pushed for a Constitutional Amendment which had no chance of passage. They have utterly failed to do a single thing about activist judges and, while making some good judicial appointments, there has been no significant change in the court system. This Republican administration and legislature have presided over the most massive expansion of the federal government in living memory.

In other words, the President and his Congress have failed to speak to their Conservative base. Instead, they have acted like any other bunch of corrupt politicians in attempting to maintain office at any cost, without doing anything significant to rock their boats.

Can we expect anything better from the Democrats, if they gain power in the House, and/or Senate? Hardly. For one thing, the Democrats have all but promised to spend the next two years ‘investigating’ (can we say witch hunting) everything from Iraq to Katrina. We can, most likely, look forward to an extensive and painful impeachment process against the President, for the crime of pursuing policies that the Democrats do not like. We can guarantee that the Democrats will sack the tax cuts which are fueling our current economic boom, raise the minimum wage and increase the level of entitlements that are already on the books, while instigating a new round of new entitlement spending.

In terms of foreign policy, we can forget about progress on the War on Terror; with the above-mentioned atmosphere of witch hunts and inquisitorial-type investigations, the administration will be lucky if it can proceed with any significant foreign policy initiatives. Woe be to the Iraqi people; the predictions of al Qaeda that all they have to do is to cause casualties, and the Americans will run tail and hide will be borne out as a truth, as in Vietnam and Somalia. This will only encourage attacks on the United States and our interests

What has happened to Congress? In their new book, “The Broken Branch,” Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, two well-known and nonpartisan political scientists, argue that the problem goes much deeper than scandals, selling out to lobbyists and failing to show up for work. (The second session of the 109th Congress sat for the shortest time in history—93 days, down from roughly 160 days in the 1970s). They write that the legislative process “has lost the transparency, accountability and deliberation that are at the core of the American system.”

In fact, the Legislative Branch has not functioned as the voice of the people since the election of President Bush; Speaker of the House Denny Hastert has stated, quite clearly, that he sees his job as passing the President’s agenda. There is no question of the Congress questioning our foreign policy, or initiating its own economic agenda; the Congress has emasculated itself to the point where it cannot do anything, except the bare minimum necessary to attempt to convince people that it is still there. It used to be that people were afraid of what Congress had the power to do; now, there is no problem with that. Congress does not do anything.

The basis of this problem goes back to the basic principle of Democracy, rule by the people. For a Democracy to work requires an informed populace, a people who are actively involved in the functioning of their government.

We are not so involved. Few of us know our Representatives. Fewer of us are aware of their positions on the issues. Most of us just want the government pork that our representative can shovel in our direction, while we condemn the pork that other representatives shovel in the way of their own representatives. We see ‘the government’ as a source of redress, instead of seeing it as an impediment to progress, as we should. Government is nothing but the essence of bureaucracy, and for anyone to think that any problem is ever solved by a bureaucracy is foolish. The purpose of a bureaucracy is to make itself bigger, and that is what is happening.

Of course, one cannot really blame the public totally; government has gotten too big for anyone to grasp. Election laws are complicated, the political parties have managed to build an election process that is guaranteed to distance the general public as much a possible from the candidates to be chosen for office, and there is virtually no real way for an individual to get involved if he or she wants to. The political system is geared for those in the system, not for the public.

Yet, it would be hard to deny that our system has some serious faults. Forty percent of the members of our Congress are millionaires, and it would be hard to argue that one must be relatively wealthy in order to run for national office. In the 2000 election, we had Albert Gore running against George W. Bush, two men from political families, backed by wealthy interests, and wealthy in and of themselves…neither candidate was exceptional in any way other than in their accident of birth. The leading Democratic Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, is the wealthy wife of the President in the 1990’s, Bill Clinton. While these indications do not fall in the definition of nepotism, it is becoming harder and harder to look at the choices available without suggesting that ability is far down on the list of qualifications necessary to run for high office, while contacts, birth and money are very high on the level of qualifications.

While this is understandable in many ways, in the atmosphere of a wealthy country, understandable does not make it good, or even healthy. Democracies do not function in an atmosphere of nepotism. We are supposed to be a nation of people, where anyone has the chance and the opportunity to rise to the top…but can we say that an Abraham Lincoln would have a chance at higher office today?

We the people have to re-take the government from the rich and special interests. It is obvious we are losing our voice in government…that government is not responsive, anymore, to the will of the people. The people are becoming further and further away from the ear of the government…and if this trend continues, we can see an event similar to the Roman Senate’s abdication of Democracy in favor of an autocratic elite. Do not say it is not possible. It is quite possible, if the people do not care.

© 2006 Steve Haas, All Rights Reserved.