PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
You've probably never heard of Teller, Alaska. Well, there's not much to hear about: A school, a general store, two taxicabs, and a laundromat. Truth is, it has been 100 years since Teller's heyday, when the gold rush swelled the town's population to 5,000. Today, jobs are scarce, and fewer than 200 people call Teller home. But this little spit of land is part of a different kind of gold rush taking place nationwide. This year, each of Teller's residents will get what amounts to a nearly $1,000 windfall from the federal government.
The source of Teller's good fortune? A particularly rambunctious appropriations season in Washington. Congressional lawmakers, inspired by tight reelection races and rosy surplus projections, are going all out to make the voters back home happy. Teller's share of the wealth is $176,000 for a factory that will turn caribou into sausage and reindeer into chops.
Call it the Old White Meat. Pork-barrel spending is an annual rite in Washington, but this year, as in all other years in recent memory, it has gotten worse. Or better, depending on your perspective. So far, with 7 of the 13 appropriations bills signed into law, pork spending is up about 20%, according to Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a budget-watchdog group. Alaska isn't complaining. Last year, lawmakers approved $25 worth of pork for each man, woman, and child in America. But Alaskans skewed that average, taking in pork projects worth $637 per capita.
BARON OF BACON. Though members of the Senate Appropriations Committee have the edge when it comes to bringing home the bacon, the blame crosses party lines and every state border. Buckeye State voters will get $250,000 in roses and trees to landscape their new highways, thanks to Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat. Savannah, Ga., will enjoy $500,000 for a water taxi. And those are the small-fry projects. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) secured almost $2 million for a new visitor's center for the Palo Alto Battlefield in Brownsville.
But hey, that's democracy at work, right? Not really. These are local projects that usually get slipped into thousand-page spending bills behind closed doors and in the heat of 11th-hour budget negotiations. Then, Congress votes on the bills without even getting a chance to read them. "You're talking about an organization that spends hundreds of billions of dollars and has no idea what they're actually spending," says Thomas A. Schatz, president of CAGW. And there's no shame here: As soon as a pork project is approved, the lawmaker responsible for the largesse announces it on his or her Web site so the folks back home can celebrate their good fortune.
In Alaska, Teller is ready to party. Lucky for them, the Prince of Pork, the Baron of Bacon, is their very own senator, Republican Ted Stevens. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he surprises budget watchdogs with his pork prowess every year. "He's in a class by himself," Schatz says. Stevens didn't return phone calls regarding Schatz's comments.
HIGH-FAT DIET. This year, the Nome-based Reindeer Herders Assn. and its 20 members will administer the $176,000 it will get as part of an $18.9 billion Interior Appropriations bill. The money will help construct a plant to process local game and produce into food. Hunters, for a fee, will get to drop off their moose or caribou at the plant one day and pick up their sausage or jerky the next. Because the plant won't be licensed for commercial use at first, it won't be able to produce reindeer chops for the local grocery. But that will happen soon enough, says Rose Fosdick, program manager for the Reindeer Herders. "We're still working on a business plan," she says. The Seward Peninsula on which Teller sits is home to about 25,000 reindeer. They could make the town a profit center some day. Reindeer meat "is "healthy. There are no chemicals. It's a high protein, low-fat meat," Fosdick says.
But it's also part of a high-fat government diet, says Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of the few governmental critics of pork-barrel spending. He estimates Congress has already agreed to $21 billion in pork spending so far this year, with just over half the spending bills approved. On Oct. 26, as Congress was putting in overtime to bust self-imposed spending caps, McCain railed from the Senate floor: "Congress and the President have blown away the last remaining vestiges of fiscal discipline."
Fosdick prefers to call it economic development. And then she alludes to the billions of dollars in farm and corporate subsidies the government doles out every year without a second thought. The Teller project, she says, "is similar to what you might find in Arizona or other agricultural communities where people are trying to make a living." And the lawmakers in Washington continue to bring home the bacon in ever thicker slabs.
By Lorraine Woellert in Washington Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
