The Academy Awards of pork-barrel spending projects were announced this week with winners ranging from studies of insect noises to a 200-space parking garage for 18 federal workers.
The "Pig Book" of purportedly wasteful government spending gave its "king of the road" and "lifetime achievement" awards to Democratic Senator Robert Byrd for bringing home to West Virginia the bacon worth some $104 million in road projects in the current 1994 government spending year.Byrd, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, also was "honored" by the group for getting another $50 million in non-road projects for his small state.
The book is put out annually by Citizens Against Government Waste, an outgrowth of the Grace Commission of industrialist Peter Grace, which studied government waste in the 1980s.
The "rediscovery of the wheel award" for research on which the fate of civilization hinges went to a $4.4 million project for continuing studies on "wood utilization." The book's authors said by the time the project ends in 1997, perhaps the toothpick will be discovered.
Senator Thad Cochran, Republican from Mississippi, won the "Dr Doolittle weird science award" for adding $200,000 to an appropriations bill for "entomology acoustics detection" to find noisy insects in his home state.
The "Field of Dreams" or "if you build it, they will come" honors went to a $2.4 million parking garage project with 200 parking spaces for 18 federal employees in the home district of Iowa Republican congressman Jim Lightfoot.
Jack Anderson, co-chairman of the group, said the $6 billion in alleged waste found in current spending bills is just a fraction of the total federal waste.