Pork Lobby Brings Home the Bacon

One man’s (or woman’s) pork-barrel spending may be another’s bread and butter. In the current budget battle in Congress, one thing is clear: Perhaps never before has the definition of “wasteful government spending” been more subjective.

To many House members, particularly members of the Republican freshman class, federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities are prime examples of waste. They believe the government should end arts funding altogether and stop underwriting public television and radio. Accordingly, the House budget proposes sharp cuts in the three agencies, a 39% drop in funding in the two endowments and an equally devastating cut in the public broadcasting budget.

Privatization is the watchword for many Congress members: If the work these agencies do is worthwhile, the private sector will pick up the ball. If not, axiomatically, federal dollars were being wasted.

So how then to explain why other agencies and programs were spared the budget ax? The Agriculture Department’s Market Promotion Program (MPP), for example, pays highly profitable agribusinesses millions of dollars a year to promote U.S.-grown products abroad. The MPP was launched a decade ago to help California growers of specialty products, like prunes, wines and nuts, that did not find ready markets overseas. It now pays to supplement the advertising budgets of growers, processors and shippers in all 50 states and virtually every congressional district.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, calls the program poorly run and of questionable value. Others, from the Heritage Foundation on the right to Ralph Nader on the left, regard the program as pure pork.

But after it proposed more than $16 billion in cuts last spring, Congress voted to increase MPP funding by almost 30%, to $110 million. Never mind that growers who receive this taxpayer largess already spend heavily on overseas promotion. The if-it’s-worth-doing,-business-will-do-it argument apparently doesn’t matter to Congress here.

The Market Promotion Program is hardly the worst or only example of pork dressed up as something else. Under nearly every budget scheme considered by Congress, deep cuts are proposed for programs for poor women and children, drug treatment, job training, housing, education, transit, environmental protection and health care. But efforts to end federal subsidies to powerful tobacco growers failed last week; the subsidy will continue, even as Congress cuts funds to address the medical problems caused by tobacco. Funding will continue for the Capitol Botanic Garden, a favorite of several congressional spouses, and for extensive gym facilities at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard that will duplicate those available to service personnel less than a mile away.

Pork? Nah, couldn’t be.