As Bush Whittles on Budget, Pork Finds Itself With Only Half the Fat

President Bush’s budget immediately drew howls of protest in Congress from lawmakers who objected to his wholesale cuts in domestic spending programs. And no item was more controversial than his proposal to slash pork-barrel spending in half.

For years, Congress has engaged in the practice of slipping money into its annual spending bills, often in the dead of night, to fund pet projects of dubious national value. The current budget is laden with 6,454 such items, carrying a price tag of $16 billion, triple the total of just two years ago.

The budget Bush sent to Congress on Monday would cut that back to $8 billion.

“Washington’s known for its pork,” Bush remarked on the morning he released his first budget. “This budget funds our needs without the fat. It also represents a new way of doing business in Washington and a new way of thinking. The budget puts the taxpayers first, and that’s exactly where they belong.”

In his campaign against pork, Bush has picked up an unlikely ally: his longtime nemesis, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). In fact, McCain, while “saluting” Bush, chided the president for not going far enough.

“I would have gone after all of them,” McCain said in an interview. He described pork-barrel spending as “just like any other evil--once you get away with it, everybody takes part in it.”

What makes the practice so difficult to combat--and so popular among lawmakers--is no mystery. From a shrimp agriculture project in the desert to a research project on the effects of cow flatulence on the Earth’s ozone layer, pork-barrel spending invariably translates into jobs for folks back home. And that means votes for its sponsors on election day.

Ordinarily, Congress leaves decisions about specific spending projects to the executive branch agencies. It would be up to the Transportation Department, for example, to decide which bridge repair projects to finance out of its annual budget.

If Congress dictated in legislation that the Oakland Bay Bridge should be repaired, that would be pork.

“Well, look, I would be the first to admit to you that there’s some excessive spending, some pork in every budget,” said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “But the things . . . that jumped out at us when we went over [the Bush budget] aren’t pork.”

Among them, Spratt said, is a $235-million program in the current budget to fund education of pediatricians, a specialty that has received less government support than others.

Over the years, Spratt said, “we’ve finally gotten it up to a decent level, something that will help us provide more in a critical area of primary care.”

Bush’s budget proposes cutting $35 million from the program.

“I mean, does anybody here think that it’s pork to train pediatricians or to give them the same kind of subsidy and underwriting that we give radiologists, cardiologists, endocrinologists who work in teaching hospitals?” Spratt fumed. “I don’t think so.”

Will Bush stand his ground in the budget horse trading to come? Or will he succumb to the temptation to restore a deleted project in exchange for, say, a senator’s vote on his cherished tax cut, which the evenly divided Senate already scaled back to $1.2 trillion?

White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. insists that Bush will stick to his guns.

“We took what we thought was a common-sense approach scaling them back,” Daniels said of the pork-barrel projects the administration inherited. “We’re going to have to work with our friends on the Hill to suggest that, while a degree of earmarking is a natural part of the process, it has gotten somewhat out of hand. And we’d like to see it reined back in.”

Outright elimination of such projects is simply “unrealistic,” Daniels said. He explained that earmarked projects “have been a part of the congressional process for a long time, and we’re not so naive as to believe they can be ended overnight.”

Daniels said about half of the projects in the 2001 budget that the administration has crossed out for 2002 are onetime items (“Generally, a bridge once built need not be built again.”) or items that former President Clinton did not request.

McCain predicted that it would not take long for protests to develop. “No doubt the public will soon get an earful from various interests affected by these cuts as they attempt to mischaracterize them as evidence of the administration’s lack of concern for this or that worthy cause,” he said.

“But opposition to earmarks is not evidence of heartlessness but an indication of the administration’s seriousness when it insists that America’s resources can be spent on national priorities--spending that follows standard budget procedures and that can withstand basic scrutiny.”

One of the earmarked projects that Bush is targeting is an $87.5-million program to fight child abuse. The president’s budget would cut $15.7 million in program grants, funds that had not been requested by the previous administration.

Bush’s budget also would provide the U.S. Department of Agriculture with $1.4 billion less, a reduction that comes from subtracting a onetime emergency funding and unrequested earmarks for research.

The true test for Bush may come if Congress ignores his entreaties to cap spending at a 4% growth rate and then sends him a tax cut at less than the $1.6 trillion he is demanding.

Will the president go along? Or will he veto some spending measures--sent to him by a Congress controlled by members of his own party?

“I’m very careful not to use the ‘V’ word, and I hope we will not need to,” Daniels said.

The prospect of such a dilemma showed one recent evening as Bush concluded a speech to 10,000 raucous, partisan supporters at East Carolina University:

“I call upon you that, when senators start to vote, for example, on the budget, you might remind them of whose money they’re spending.”