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Pork Barrel Spending

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SENATOR MCCAIN STATEMENT ON THE CONSOLIDATED APPROPRIATIONS ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008

December 18, 2007

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today submitted the following statement for the Congressional Record on H.R. 2764, the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008:
 
“Mr. President, Fiscal Year 2008 began seventy- nine days ago. And yet here we are at the end of the calendar year - with Christmas one week away - and everyone scrambling to finally get our work done and get out of town. This process, and the monstrosity it has produced, is the height of irresponsibility. We owe the taxpayer more than this.
 
“In the past, I have stood here on the Senate floor to speak about how our economic situation and our vital national security concerns require us to take greater effort in prioritizing our federal spending and that we could no longer afford, literally, ‘business as usual.’ Actually, Mr. President, what we have before us is even worse than business as usual because the bill we received from the House provides not a single penny to fund our ongoing mission in Iraq. We are at war and our men and women serving in Iraq today continue to face a fierce and determined enemy - and this bill does not fund their mission. The omission of Iraq funding is no more than a political stunt - and we all know it. What kind of message does this send to those brave men and women in the field Mr. President?
 
“Unfortunately, little has changed over the years, Mr. President. Here we are again, nearly three full months into fiscal year 2008, and we have before us another appropriations monster. Let me remind my colleagues that, because of our inability to get much done around here under the regular order, we have been forced to consider huge omnibus appropriations bills and one long-term continuing resolution in five of the last six fiscal years.
 
“The bill before us today is more than 1,400 pages long and is accompanied by a joint explanatory statement that was so big they couldn’t even number the pages! This bill consolidates 11 of the 12 annual appropriations bills with a price tag of nearly $475 billion. Amazingly, Mr. President, this bill contains 9,170 earmarks. Add those to the 2,161 earmarks that were contained in the defense appropriations bill and the grand total for FY 08 earmarks stands at 11,331 unnecessary, wasteful, run-of-the-mill pork barrel projects. And that is just for the House- and Senate-passed bill - I can only imagine what this will look like when it comes out of conference.
 
“A New York Times/CBS News poll that was released today shows that the approval rating of Congress stands at 21%. Can we blame the American people for holding us in such low esteem? Let’s look at how we’re spending their hard earned tax dollars.
 
“Here is just a sampling of some of the earmarks contained in this bill:
$150,000 for the STEEED (Soaring Toward Educational Enrichment via Equine Discovery) Youth Program in Washington, DC. Basically - this is an earmark of $150,000 so that disadvantaged kids can ride horses.
$50,000 for the construction of a National Mule and Packers Museum in Bishop, CA.
$100,000 for Cooters Pond Park in Prattville, AL.
$625,000 for the Historic Congressional Cemetery right here on Capitol Hill.
$1.95 million for the City College of NY for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.
$975,000 for the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR.
$1.628 million for animal vaccines in Greenport, NY.
$477,000 for Barley Health Food Benefits in Beltsville, MD.
$244,000 for Bee Research in Weslaco, TX.
$10 million to Nevada for the design and construction of the Derby Dam fish screen to allow passage of fish.
$1.6 million for sensitivity training for law enforcement in Los Angeles.
$1.786 million to develop an exhibit for the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Michigan.
$846,000 to the Father’s Day Rally Committee in Philadelphia, PA.
$125,000 for International Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, WV.
$470,000 for an Oyster Hatchery Economic Pilot Program, Morgan State University, MD.
$446,500 for Horseshoe Crab Research, Virginia Tech, VA.
$125,000 for the Polish American Cultural Center in Philadelphia, PA.
$400,000 for the National Iron Worker’s Training Program.
$350,000 for leafy spurge control in North Dakota.
$1.725 million for the Hudson Valley Welcome Center in Hyde Park, NY.
 
“This omnibus was made available just yesterday, yet approved by the House last night. Imagine that, Mr. President - a 1,445 page bill, with a joint explanatory statement that is nine inches tall and costs $475 billion was made available and voted on by both chambers in less than 48 hours. Simply remarkable. It is impossible for us to know exactly what is in this thing, and we’re expected to simply take the appropriators word that it’s all okay. Well, Mr. President, I’ve been around here long enough to know that a bill of this size, put together behind closed doors and rammed through at the last minute, cannot be all good. And I know it will be a long time before all of the hidden provisions in this legislation are exposed.
 
“I fully recognize that it isn’t necessarily the fault of the appropriators that we are forced into this new pattern of adopting omnibus appropriations measures. Overly partisan politics has largely prevented us from following the regular legislative order, and that fact must change. But while it may not be the appropriator’s fault that we are forced to consider omnibus appropriations measures, it is their decision to continue to load them up with unauthorized earmarks - and at a rate that seems only increases year after year.
 
“When we ram through a gigantic bill, spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer’s dollars with little or no debate because we want to go home for Christmas, we send the message to the American people that we are not serious enough about our jobs. We essentially accomplish little almost all year long because everything requires 60 votes, and then, at the very last minute, we scramble around and throw together a mammoth bill like the one before us today. We’re sending the signal that it is more important for us to be able to issue press releases, and I’m sure hundreds of them will be going out today, about how much pork we’ve been able to get for our states and districts, than we are about good government and fiscal responsibility. How can we, in good conscience, defend this behavior to the American people?
 
“Among the most egregious aspects of this bill are the so-called ‘economic development initiatives’ funded under the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This account is nothing more than a slush fund for the appropriators - plain and simple. Contained within this section of the joint explanatory statement are 741 locality-specific earmarks costing nearly $180 million. These pork barrel projects are spread out over 42 pages and fund everything from construction of coastal trails, nature education centers, public parks and renovations for museums and theaters.
 
“On defense matters, the Omnibus Appropriations Bill proposes funding $1.18 billion in military construction projects that were not requested by the President. Of that amount, $584 million was vetted by both the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees to ensure that the Services’ critical unfunded priorities requirements were met. On the Senate floor, those projects were further reviewed, and approved in the Senate versions of the Authorization and Appropriations bills.
 
“However, this bloated Omnibus Appropriations Bill also includes another $580 million—for 108 military ‘airdropped’ construction projects, that is, funding for projects that were not included in any previous appropriations bill passed by the House or Senate. The House appropriators have once again waited until the last minute to present these new spending items to skirt responsibility for their pork spending. Mr. President, in the ethics reform law we passed with much fanfare earlier this year, we amended Senate Rule 44 specifically to discourage such ‘airdropping’ of projects in the dead of night. In an unprecedented and unfortunate act, the Majority accepted $328 million of airdropped military construction authorizations into the recently passed National Defense Authorization Bill. It was in part for this reason that I reluctantly decided not to sign the defense authorization conference report. I could not then, and cannot now, support the parachuting of new spending items into final reports that have not been transparently vetted on the floor of Congress. I am very disappointed that we in the Senate continue to condone this irresponsible practice in light of our efforts to prevent it with ethics reform.
 
“The Omnibus Appropriations Bill also earmarks over $41 million for the planning and design of pork military construction projects requested by Members of Congress. Congress normally authorizes funding annually for each military service to plan and design their critical future military construction priorities. This bill disregards the military's priorities and earmarks funds towards specific projects—without the Department being given the opportunity to determine whether or not those projects reflects actual military requirements.
 
“Even more egregious is that we are proposing to pay for this airdropped pork by cutting over $900 million from the amount of $8.1 billion requested by the President to carry out the critical military construction activities related to the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment round. Mr. President, the Department of Defense and the local communities affected by BRAC need enough funding to meet the statutory deadline of September 2011. To underfund BRAC in order to pay for earmarks is a sad reflection on the priorities of this Congress, which has again unabashedly put parochial interests above the needs of the Defense Department, our local communities and the American taxpayer.
 
“Mr. President, we simply must start making some very tough decisions around here if we are serious about improving our fiscal future. We need to be thinking about the future of America and the future generations who are going to be paying the tab for our continued spending. It is simply not fiscally responsible for us to continue to load up appropriations bills with wasteful and unnecessary spending, and good deals for special interests and their lobbyists. We have had ample opportunities to tighten our belts in this town in recent years, and we have taken a pass each and every time. We can’t put off the inevitable any longer, Mr. President.
 
“In a report on our long-term budget outlook issued this month, the Congressional Budget Office states this: ‘Significant uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, but under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path - that is, federal debt will grow much faster than the economy over the long run. In the absence of significant changes in policy, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to grow rapidly.’
 
“The report goes on to say that: ‘If outlays increased as projected and revenues did not grow at a corresponding rate, deficits would climb and federal debt would grow significantly. Substantial budget deficits would reduce national saving, which would lead to an increase in borrowing from abroad and lower levels of domestic investment that in turn would constrain income growth in the United States. In the extreme, deficits could seriously harm the economy. Such economic damage could be averted by putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal course, which would require some combination of less spending and more revenues than the amounts now projected. Making such changes sooner rather than later would lessen the risk that an unsustainable fiscal path poses to the economy.’ Again - this is not my dire prediction - it comes from our own CBO.
 
“To underscore the urgency of the problem, in a speech at The National Press Club just yesterday, David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States announced that - for the 11th straight year - the federal government failed its financial audit. Mr. Walker said that ‘the federal government’s total liabilities and unfunded commitments for future benefits payments promised under the current Social Security and Medicare programs are now estimated at $53 trillion, in current dollar terms, up from about $20 trillion in 2000. This translates into a defacto mortgage of about $455,000 for every American household and there’s no house to back this mortgage! In other words, our government has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot possibly keep without huge tax increases.’
 
“The Comptroller General also highlighted a specific program that serves as an example of the serious problems we face. He said: ‘The prescription drug benefit alone represents about $8 trillion of Medicare’s $34 trillion gap. Incredibly, this number was not disclosed or discussed until after the Congress had voted on the bill and the President had signed it into law. Generations of Americans will be paying the price - with compound interest - for this new entitlement benefit.’ He went on to note that: ‘Unfortunately, once federal programs or agencies are created, the tendency is to fund them in perpetuity. Washington rarely seems to question the wisdom of its existing commitments. Instead, it simply adds new programs and initiatives on top of the old ones. This continual layering is a key reason our government has grown so large, so expensive, so inefficient, and in some cases, so ineffective.’
 
“Mr. Walker ended his speech by saying ‘If all of us do our part, and if we start making tough choices sooner rather than later, we can keep America great, ensure that our future is better than the past, and ensure that our great nation is the first republic to stand the test of time. To me, that is a cause worth fighting for.’ I agree wholeheartedly, Mr. President. And I say to my colleagues - let’s start making those tough choices today. We have to face the facts, and one fact is that we can’t continue to spend taxpayer’s dollars on wasteful, unnecessary pork barrel projects or cater to wealthy corporate special interests any longer. The American people won’t stand for it, and they shouldn’t - they deserve better treatment from us.”
 

 

 

 

 






December 2007 Press Releases