Attn: Assignment editors

            Today’s editions of many newspapers include articles about the annual appearance of the “Pig Book,” a compendium of pork-barrel spending provisions which congressmen attach to appropriations bills in a manner that guarantees government funds for projects without subjecting them to normal bureaucratic review procedures. Often, even the Congress is kept in the dark as more and more so-called “earmarks” are slipped into bills without hearings, sometimes even after the House or Senate has already finished their work on them.

            Mostly, today’s reporting will focus on the national crime—this really is a theft of taxpayer’s money. Despite tough talk last year about “earmark reform,” Congress did not curb its appetite for pork-barrel spending. Lawmakers crammed over 11,000 projects into the 12 appropriations bills that are funding the federal government’s operations during the current 2008 fiscal year. Altogether, these earmarks skimmed $17.2 billion from the U.S. Treasury.

            That was a whopping 337% increase over the 2,658 projects totaling $13.2 billion that were packed into the previous year’s collection of appropriations bills.

            One reason for the increase may be a testimonial to the ability of watchdog organizations, in this case Citizens Against Government Waste, to analyze the mind-numbing legislative language of appropriations bills that run to thousands of pages and pluck out these obscure provisions for public scrutiny.

            Today’s spate of news stories will focus on some of the most egregious examples of wasteful earmarks, such as $3 million to teach poor children how to play golf, or $460,000 to help Anheuser Busch and Coors Brewing Co. develop a better beermaking hop, or $211,000 for olive fruit fly research being conducted in France.

            It’s not that these aren’t worthwhile endeavors. It’s just that the money to pay for them really shouldn’t come from U.S. taxpayers. Certainly, the multi-billion dollar beer industry giants can scrape two or three seconds off of a Super Bowl commercial to find a better hop, and France can finance its own fruit fly research. And if it makes good sense to teach poor children how to play golf, then municipal golf courses—and not federal taxpayers’ wallets—should be opened to them.

            So who’s worse? Liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans? Surprisingly, the worst offenders are Republicans who serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

            CAGW’s 2008 edition shines the spotlight on Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) as the top porkers in Congress. Apparently, they’ve hung a sign in the appropriations committee’s room that says: “Will work for pork.”

            More than 1,100 pork-barrel projects are described in a 59-page summary of the “pig book.” A quick scan uncovered these among hundreds of examples which are not mentioned in today’s spate of news stories (all gist for the local reporting mill):

            * $1.6 million for the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, even though the facility has over 2 million visitors per year, 36 corporate benefactors, and a fund with over $200 million in assets.

            * $1.3 million for the Abyssinian Development Corp., New York City, to support various housing and social welfare programs in Harlem.

            * $3.0 million to build a conference center in Santee, S.C., defended as a legitimate federal expense because the facility will also be used as a hurricane evacuation center.

            * $393,000 to help finance the renovation of the privately-owned building in Iowa, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, into a 26-room hotel.

            CAGW’s website features a gateway to its database of earmarks. Just click to select a lawmaker by name or state and the program will display each selected lawmaker’s list of earmark spending projects (and the amounts of taxpayer funds appropriated for them).

–Edward Zuckerman, Editor