(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today rebuked the steadily amassing list of egregious pork-barrel projects in the $80 billion Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief (H.R. 1268), passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee last week and scheduled for floor debate this week.

“Because this is a must-pass bill, it is vulnerable to manipulation by members of Congress bent on bringing home the bacon, even if it has a negative impact on our troops,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said. 

The bill contains many provisions that were either not requested or greatly exceeded the President’s budget request, added by Senate appropriators, or are clearly not related to an “emergency” military spending bill:

• $103 million for the Emergency Watershed Protection Program;

• $55 million, on top of the $53.4 million budget request, for refugee and migration aid;

• $55 million for wastewater treatment in Desoto County, Mississippi;

• $26 million for the National Nuclear Security Administration to transfer materials from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Device Assembly Facility in Nevada;

• $25 million for the Fort Peck Fish Hatchery in Montana;

• $10 million in excess of the President’s budget request for assistance for former Soviet Union independent states, totaling $70 million ($60 million of which will go to Ukraine);

• $4 million for the Office of Science, including: $3,000,000 for health science equipment; $500,000 for a desalination technology program at the University of Nevada-Reno; and $500,000 for the oral history of the Negotiated Settlement Project at University of Nevada Reno and the Fire Sciences Academy in Elko, Nevada.

• $3 million for the University of Hawaii to replace research and materials lost in a flood in October, 2004;

• $2.5 million for the Department of Justice Inspector General;

• $2.24 million in excess of the President’s request for tsunami warning centers and other resources at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – an agency notorious for wasteful spending and mismanagement.

These projects will add to the 13,997 pork-barrel projects already appropriated in the fiscal 2005 budget, at a cost of $27.3 billion, as detailed in CAGW’s 2005 Congressional Pig Book, available at www.cagw.org.

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.