Not One Cent for Porkbarrel

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

What’s the right metaphor for the endlessly complicated assemblage of porkbarrel stuffed into federal spending bills?

Is it a Rubik’s cube, something to be finally and fully revealed when you figure out how to untangle all the interlocking layers? Or more of a matryoshka doll, the nested Russian figurine that reveals yet another copy of itself every time you open it up and think you’ve finally reached the last?

A new book by Winslow Wheeler details an approach to national defense many voters may not know about. Nor even students of porkbarrel. It’s called The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security. And it’s all about how congressmen scrub defense-​related budget items to make room for pork.

Wheeler spent thirty years as a congressional staffer working on national security issues, on both sides of the aisle. He learned that lawmakers are not simply using the opportunity of a spending bill to lard it with unrelated spending. They’re actually cutting defense expenditures on training and equipment and the like. A kind of sausage-​making that’s simple in essence, complicated in ugly political detail. In one chapter, Wheeler recounts how $2.4 billion in actual defense-​related items was chopped from a bill while $4 billion in pork was added.

Military spending can also be ill-​conceived. But obviously, it should be advocated or opposed on the merits. Not arbitrarily funneled into wasteful favor-trading.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.