Culture and Context:
Fresh from the sausage factory
By Susan Miller
Published on April 5, 2006 - 03:52 AM
The Citizens Against Government Waste have released the 2006 edition of the The Congressional Pig Book. It’s a compilation of the “pork-barrel projects in the federal budget.†According to the CAGW Website, the “2006 Pig Book identified 9,963 projects in the 11 appropriations bills that constitute the discretionary portion of the federal budget for fiscal 2006, costing taxpayers $29 billion.
The narrative summary page lists the “juiciest†earmarks by general category (agriculture, homeland security, foreign operations, etc.), then describes funding allocated to states whose members serve on various appropriations committees. For example, under Agriculture, you’ll find the annual Alaska bashing:
$33,360,000 for projects in the state of Senate appropriator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), including: $25,000,000 for rural and native villages; $1,300,000 for berry research; $1,099,000 for alternative salmon products; $500,000 for fruit and berry crop trials for rural villages; $443,000 for new crop opportunities; $331,000 for food preparation and marketing research; $300,000 for commercialization of native plant materials; $250,000 for ethnobotany research; $166,000 for salmon quality standards; and $75,000 for seafood waste research.
I didn’t see many in the summary related to technology. Here’s one listed under Defense:
$32,800,000 added for projects in the state of House appropriators Joseph Knollenberg (R-Mich.) and Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), including: $7,000,000 for the Future Tactical Truck System; $7,000,000 for the Modular Causeway System; and $1,000,000 for the Gaming-Technology Software Initiative.
Here’s the description for Real ID listed under Homeland Security:
$40,000,000 added by the Senate for the Real ID Grant Program. Passed in May 2005, the Real ID Act for the first time set federal standards for authenticating and securing state-issued driver’s licenses. DHS has two options: allow states to use inexpensive, protected technology, or force them to embed costly, personally intrusive brittle computer chips. Whichever alternative is used, the new system will place a heavy burden on state and local governments, especially departments of motor vehicles, as well as on taxpayers and drivers.
You can search the database by year, state and keyword. No doubt you’ll find the “oinkers†like the $100,000 for the Richard Steele Boxing Club in Henderson, Nevada, but not all the earmarks are as frivolous as CAGW suggests. If you search for “technology†in the 2005 database (2006 to be posted shortly) for an individual state (I checked MD and VA), you’ll see that almost all the awards go to law enforcement.
|
|
 |
|
There are currently no comments to display.
|
|
|
|
To post a comment, you must be a registered user of FCW.com and be logged in. Use one of the forms below to login or register for FREE to FCW.com. To protect your privacy, you can use an alias as your username.
|
|
|
|
