Burnt Orange Report

I want some appropriations, too!

By Vince Leibowitz

Guest Post By Vince Leibowitz

By now, we've all witnessed several news cycles full of carping and complaining about the massive H.R. 4818, the Consolidated Appropriations Act or 2005. We've heard about the funding for mariachi music, the weather museum, and the nuts and bolts of the bill.

But, what else, exactly, is in the spending bill? I decided to take a look.

First of all, you'd think it would be easy to find the darn thing. Well, it would have been if I'd remembered the bill's number. So, I checked the "Currently on the Floor" section of the U.S. House site for yesterday and found it.

Then, I set out to look for the "pork," just to see what else there was that wasn't on the national media's radar. I also wanted to see just exactly what else is in a federal appropriations act. After all, given that the bill weighs something like 33 pounds in printed form, it's not like AP can digest all of that in to a graph or anything.

Well, there obviously isn't a section entitled "Pork," so I scrolled down the very, very long page to look for sections that sound like they might include a little pork.

Finally, way on down the list, I selected "Office of Museum and Library Services, Grant Administration." Sure to be some "pork" there, I thought.

Sure enough, $282,827,000 worth of projects that, while do doubt of importance to their individual communities, could surely be considered as "pork," by conservative budget hawks.

Some of my personal favorites included:

+$100,000 shall be awarded to Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), Dearborn, Michigan, for exhibits and museum programs +$200,000 shall be awarded to Baylor University, Waco, Texas, for archival activities, exhibits, and education programs for the Mayborn Museum Complex (wait a minute, that's a PRIVATE RELIGIOUS COLLEGE!!) +$500,000 shall be awarded to Bishop Museum in Hawaii for digitization of old Hawaiian language newspapers and other activities to preserve the culture of Native Hawaiians +$150,000 shall be awarded to Italian-American Cultural Center of Iowa in Des Moines, Iowa, for exhibits, multi-media collections, display +$950,000 shall be awarded to Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to develop educational programs focusing on hands-on learning experiences

But, as expected, all of this is for museums and libraries. So, where's the other juicy stuff? I went back to the top.

"Sec. 4--Statement of Appropriations" included a number of agricultural appropriations to universities and for extension services, but nothing too exciting.

So, I continued along and found $8,000,000 for Burma, $4,000,000 for Tibet, and $5,800,000 for multi-national species conservation.

Further on, I found $10,000,000 for a psychiatric treatment facility in Bethel, Alaska, and an interesting little provision tucked away elsewhere:

Each educational institution that receives Federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution.

I also found an interesting provision changing some banal language concerning our National Tree, the Oak.

Needless to say, I examined the bill for the better part of an hour and couldn't find even some of the most celebrated sections the media's been discussing. I specifically wanted to find the mariachi appropriation just to see what else was with it. The thing is just too darned big there are literally thousands of places to slip in something. Unfortunatly, because of the way the server you access the bill on, some things didn't seem to show up right, which may be why I couldn't find some of the better stuff.

Either way, I was just thinking how lovely it would be to have one's name--or the name of one's favorite charity, favorite blog, or favorite museum--tucked away in the ol' appropriations bill. Maybe if I caught Ralph Hall on a good day I could convince him of the importance of funding a "Texas Political Webloggers Funding Initiative". Let the federal funding flow! Alas, we can dream, ha ha ha.

This made me remember an interview I did with Bill Hollowell, the former State Representative from Van Zandt County back when he was running again in 2000. He got to talking about pork barreling in Texas, and how much he hated it. (It should be noted he also hated teacher pay raises, the Texas Jazz Festival and almost everything else that cost money.) Anyway, I remember he was talking about the Salt Palace in Grand Saline and said: something like: "I never liked all that pork barreling. But, I remember one time [he served through much of the 70s and 80s] they really got that ol' pork barrell a rollin' down there and I just decided to put in an appropriation for the Salt Palace. I figured it was as good as anything else that was getting money." Salt pork, anyone?

Vince Leibowitz is County Chairman of the Democratic Party of Van Zandt County. He is a regular contributor to the Political State Report.