When the president asks Congress for a "supplemental appropriation"-extra money, in layman's terms-it means a crisis is at hand.
It means problems have arisen that are so severe they can't wait for the normal budget cycle, which begins Oct. 1. And so they have: President Bush wants an additional $27 billion to fund the war on terrorism.
Congress is about to approve his request. But now the president
is threatening a veto.
One look at the bill explains why: It's larded with an amount of
pork that's extreme even by the standards of official
Washington.
The culprit in this instance is the Senate. The House of
Representatives-which has approved more than its share of pork in
the past-did the right thing this time and passed the president's
request almost intact.
Not so the Senate. The lawmakers in that chamber apparently
believe that the war on terrorism must include $700,000 for a
"biomass" (human waste) project at Mississippi State University.
And $2 million to store the Smithsonian's collection of worms and
other organisms in an alcohol solution. And $750,000 for the Smart
Start Child Care Center and Expertise School in Las Vegas.
What do these initiatives have to do with fighting terror? Good
question.
Not that the Senate does nothing but spend, mind you. Lawmakers
did hold the line against some of the president's requests. They
turned down $12.5 million for a foreign terrorist tracking task
force and $3.6 million to beef up the U.S. Capitol Police. Yes,
items that might actually help thwart terrorists.
But they found plenty of other items that somehow couldn't wait
until October. According to the Senate, we won't survive the summer
unless we give $34 million to the United Nations population fund,
$412,000 to the Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation
Training Center and $765,000 to the Clark R. Bavin National Fish
and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Oregon.
We'll never make it to football season without spending $11
million to assist the New England fishing industry and $2.5 million
to map coral reefs off Hawaii and $1 million to convert subsidized
housing to student housing in Baltimore and $3 million to drill
five wells in Santa Fe, N.M.
We'll never see the leaves turn colors unless we give $43
million to Amtrak, whose officers say it may fold as early as
July.
And it turns out that America's agribusiness giants-recipients
only a few weeks ago of the largest corporate welfare package in
the nation's history-won't live to see the end of harvest season
without more "emergency" assistance. Their requests include
requiring the Agriculture Department to fully fund a "Dog Dealers
Task Force" to report violations in puppy breeding and sustaining
research on tracheal mites and honeybees.
And it seems we're supposed to believe that dire things may
happen if we don't-right now, before October, with spending already
out of control-spend $2 million for more research on mad cow
disease, $3 million for cattle genome sequencing, $50 million to
renovate the National Animal Disease Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, $19
million for animal health surveillance and $21.6 million for pest
detection.
Some of these projects may be worth funding. But
emergencies?
It would be bad enough if all this bill represented was the
failure of Congress to recognize the frustration most Americans
feel watching their hard-earned dollars wasted on pork-if it was
another example of how policies designed to produce fiscal sanity
are wantonly thwarted and the concept of "emergency spending" is
twisted beyond recognition.
The problem is: We do have an emergency. It needs to be dealt with. And this certainly isn't the way to do it.
Brian
Riedl is the Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary
affairs at The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org), where Ronald
Utt is a senior research fellow.
Distributed nationally on the Knight-Ridder Tribune wire