Pork barrel, or simply pork, is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to direct expenditures to a representative's district. The usage originated in American English, and it indicates a negotiated way of political particularism.
Scholars use it as a technical term regarding legislative control of local appropriations. [1] [2] In election campaigns, the term is used in derogatory fashion to attack opponents. Typically, "pork" involves national funding for government programs whose economic or service benefits are concentrated in a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers. Public works projects, certain national defense spending projects, and agricultural subsidies are the most commonly cited examples. Citizens Against Government Waste outlines seven criteria by which spending in the United States can be classified as "pork": [3]
The term pork barrel politics originated in American English, [4] and usually refers to spending intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form of campaign contributions or votes. In the popular 1863 story "The Children of the Public", Edward Everett Hale used the term pork barrel as a homely metaphor for any form of public spending to the citizenry; [5] however, after the American Civil War, the term came to be used in a derogatory sense. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term from 1873. [6]
Pork barrels originally came from storing meat. [7] By the 1870s, references to "pork" were common in Congress, and the term was further popularized by a 1919 article by Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review, which reported on certain legislative acts known to members of Congress as "pork barrel bills". He claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving enslaved people a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout. [8] More generally, a barrel of salt pork was a common larder item in 19th-century households and could be used as a measure of the family's financial well-being. For example, in his 1845 novel The Chainbearer, James Fenimore Cooper wrote: "I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel." [9]
An early example of pork barrel politics in the United States was the Bonus Bill of 1817, which was introduced by Democrat John C. Calhoun to construct highways linking the Eastern and Southern United States to its Western frontier using the earnings bonus from the Second Bank of the United States. Calhoun argued for it using general welfare and post-roads clauses of the United States Constitution. Although he approved of the economic development goal, President James Madison vetoed the bill as unconstitutional.
One of the most famous alleged pork-barrel projects was the Big Dig in Boston, Massachusetts. The Big Dig was a project to relocate an existing 3.5-mile (5.6 km) section of the Interstate Highway System underground. The official planning phase started in 1982; the construction was done between 1991 and 2006, and the project concluded on December 31, 2007. It ended up costing US$14.6 billion, or over US$4 billion per mile. [10] Tip O'Neill (D-Mass), after whom one of the Big Dig tunnels was named, pushed to have the Big Dig funded by the federal government while he was the speaker of the United States House of Representatives. [11]
During the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the Gravina Island Bridge (also known as the "Bridge to Nowhere") in Alaska was cited as an example of pork barrel spending. The bridge, pushed for by Republican Senator Ted Stevens, was projected to cost $398 million and would connect the island's 50 residents and the Ketchikan International Airport to Revillagigedo Island and Ketchikan. [12] Pork-barrel projects, which differ from earmarks , are added to the federal budget by members of the appropriation committees of the United States Congress. This allows the delivery of federal funds to the local district or state of the appropriation committee member, often accommodating major campaign contributors. To a certain extent, a member of Congress is judged by their ability to deliver funds to their constituents. The Chairman and the ranking member of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations are in a position to deliver significant benefits to their states. Researchers Anthony Fowler and Andrew B. Hall claim that this still does not account for the high reelection rates of incumbent representatives in American legislatures. [13] Former Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye described himself as "the No. 1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress". [14] Inouye regularly passed earmarks for funding in the state of Hawaii including military and transportation spending. [15]
An omnibus spending bill is a type of bill in the United States that packages many of the smaller ordinary appropriations bills into one larger single bill that can be passed with only one vote in each house of Congress. There are twelve different ordinary appropriations bills that need to be passed each year to fund the federal government and avoid a government shutdown. An omnibus spending bill combines two or more of those bills into a single bill.
Charles Jeremy Lewis was an American politician who was a U.S. representative, last serving California's 41st congressional district. He was first elected to Congress in 1978, and previously represented the 40th, 35th, and 37th districts. A Republican, he was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, serving in that role during the 109th Congress. In January 2012 he announced that he was not running for re-election and would end his congressional career in January 2013.
Raymond H. LaHood is an American politician who served as the 16th United States Secretary of Transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the Illinois House of Representatives (1982–1983) and United States House of Representatives (1995–2009).
The United States House Committee on Appropriations is a committee of the United States House of Representatives that is responsible for passing appropriation bills along with its Senate counterpart. The bills passed by the Appropriations Committee regulate expenditures of money by the government of the United States. As such, it is one of the most powerful committees, and its members are seen as influential.
The United States Senate Committee on Appropriations is a standing committee of the United States Senate. It has jurisdiction over all discretionary spending legislation in the Senate.
The power of the purse is the ability of one group to control the actions of another group by withholding funding, or putting stipulations on the use of funds. The power of the purse can be used positively or negatively. The power of the purse is most often utilized by forces within a government that do not have direct executive power, but have control over budgets and taxation.
Gravina Island is an island in the Gravina Islands of the Alexander Archipelago in southeastern Alaska. It is 21 miles (34 km) long and about 9.5 miles (15.3 km) wide, with a land area of 94.81 square miles (245.6 km2). The island had a population of 50 people at the 2000 census.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2005 (CAA) was an omnibus appropriation legislation consisting of eleven Divisions, enacted on December 8, 2004, as H.R. 4818 by President Bush and assigned Public Law No. 108-447, during the 108th United States Congress. It approved appropriations of $388 billion for eleven departments, including "foreign operations, export financing, related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, and for other purposes."
The U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development is one of twelve subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. The United States Senate Committee on Appropriations has joint jurisdiction with the United States House Committee on Appropriations over all appropriations bills in the United States Congress. Each committee has 12 matching subcommittees, each of which is tasked with working on one of the twelve annual regular appropriations bills.
In the United States, a continuing resolution is a type of appropriations legislation. An appropriations bill is a bill that appropriates money to specific federal government departments, agencies, and programs. The money provides funding for operations, personnel, equipment, and activities. Regular appropriations bills are passed annually, with the funding they provide covering one fiscal year. The fiscal year is the accounting period of the federal government, which runs from October 1 to September 30 of the following year.
Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users or SAFETEA-LU was a funding and authorization bill that governed United States federal surface transportation spending. It was signed into law by President George W. Bush on August 10, 2005, as Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law 109–59 (text)(PDF) and 119 Stat. 1144.
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization in the United States. It functions as a "government watchdog" and advocacy group for fiscally conservative causes. The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) is the lobbying arm of CAGW, organized as a section 501(c)(4) organization and therefore is permitted to engage in direct lobbying activities. According to its website, "CAGW is a private, non-partisan, non-profit organization representing more than one million members and supporters nationwide. CAGW's stated mission is to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government."
The Gravina Island Bridge, commonly referred to as the "Bridge to Nowhere", was a proposed bridge to replace the ferry that currently connects the town of Ketchikan, Alaska, United States, with Gravina Island, an island that contains the Ketchikan International Airport as well as 50 residents. The bridge was projected to cost $398 million. Members of the Alaskan congressional delegation, particularly Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, were the bridge's biggest advocates in Congress, and helped push for federal funding. The project encountered fierce opposition outside Alaska as a symbol of pork barrel spending and is labeled as one of the more prominent "bridges to nowhere". As a result, Congress removed the federal earmark for the bridge in 2005. Funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere" was continued as of March 2, 2011, in the passing of H.R. 662: Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2011 by the House of Representatives, and finally cancelled in 2015.
Congressional stagnation is an American political theory that attempts to explain the high rate of incumbency re-election to the United States House of Representatives. In recent years this rate has been well over 90 per cent, with rarely more than 5–10 incumbents losing their House seats every election cycle. The theory has existed since the 1970s, when political commentators were beginning to notice the trend, with political science author and professor David Mayhew first writing about the "vanishing marginals" theory in 1974.
Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) is a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. TCS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization; its 501(c)(4) affiliate is Taxpayers for Common Sense Action. The current president of TCS is Stephen Ellis. Founded in 1995 by Jill Lancelot and Rafael DeGennaro, TCS states that its mission is to ensure that the federal government spends taxpayer money efficiently and responsibly.
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An earmark is a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process. Earmarks feature in United States Congress spending policy, and they are present in public finance of many other countries as a form of political particularism.
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The Bonus Bill of 1817 was legislation proposed by John C. Calhoun to earmark the revenue "bonus," as well as future dividends, from the recently established Second Bank of the United States for an internal improvements fund. Proponents of the bill stressed the nearly universally accepted need for improvements and brushed off strict constructionists with their own arguments in favor of "implied powers." Although President James Madison approved of the need and stated goals of improvements, he vetoed the bill as unconstitutional because he found no expressed congressional power to fund roads and canals in Article I, Section 8, of the United States Constitution. His veto message represented an important explication by the "Father of the Constitution."
The Gravina Island Highway is a 3.2-mile-long (5.1 km) gravel highway located on Gravina Island, in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough of the U.S. state of Alaska. The highway was part of a project that would connect Gravina Island, specifically, the Ketchikan International Airport, to the city of Ketchikan. The Gravina Island Bridge, which would have connected the highway to Ketchikan was cancelled, but the highway was built. Because the highway does not pass by or connect to any village or other place of importance, it has been nicknamed the Highway to Nowhere.
