July 16, 2005

US Congress Pork-Barreling

Mustafa Hirji (email) at 01:34 PM

Because of the absence of party discipline in the US Congress, there is a lot more negotiation and compromise in Congress. In some ways this is a good thing: e.g. other views get taken into account when drafting legislation. However, one major disadvantage of it is that pork-barreling is out of control in the US.

Every time any kind of spending bill comes up for approval, it gets amended until most members of the House and the Senate have some money flowing to their constituency. That way all these Congressmen can argue that they brought more spending (and therefore jobs) into the the constituency and they deserve re-election so they can continue to bring federal money to the district. Indeed, Ted Kennedy almost lost his 1994 re-election on the grounds that he had a poor record of bringing federal money into Massachusetts in his previous term.

Of course, this means that there are enormous inefficiencies in the US government. For example, production of most military hardware is spread out over more than 40 states.

A Department of Energy taskforce recently noted that nuclear weapons production is spread over seven facilities across the US (there are actually more if you include all the little bits of metal and electronic pieces that are used by these seven). The taskforce recommends moving it all to one facility to reduce costs and reduce the number of terrorist targets.

So what does Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee (which controls the nuclear weapons budget) do? He says, "I do not think we should rush into any quick fixes" and promptly re-writes the appropriations bill to prohibit any funds from being used to implement the taskforce's recommendations. Of course, he's from New Mexico, and he can't allow the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories lose nuclear weapons production money.

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