Pork Barrel Politics

What Is Pork Barrel Politics?

Pork-barrel politics is the legislator's practice of slipping funding for a local project into a budget. The project may have nothing to do with the bill and may benefit only the legislator's home district. Before a bill gets to a vote, pork-barreling has often greatly inflated its costs through the addition of various legislators' pet projects.

In modern politics, pork-barreling and earmarking have become virtually synonymous. To be fair, one politician's pork-barrel politics is another's constituent service.

Understanding Pork Barrel Politics

The annual Congressional Pig Book documenting pork-barrel projects in the federal budget is published by a nonprofit organization called Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).

CAGW defines a pork-barrel project as a line item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose while circumventing established budgetary procedures. Entries in the annual Congressional Pig Book satisfy at least two of seven criteria:

In addition to all of the above, a project or program must have appeared in prior years as an earmark in order to qualify for the Pig Book.

The Bipartisan Budget Act removed all constraints on pork-barrel projects in 2018. The number of such projects and their overall price tag soared in 2019.

The year 2019 was a record-breaker for both the number and cost of pork-barrel projects added to the federal budget, according to CAGW.

Emptying the Pork Barrel

Pork barrel politics was probably invented by the first legislator who ever lived, but it survives today, often under the slightly less pejorative term earmarks. In either case, it is a sum of money inserted as a line item in the federal budget that funds a specific project.

If there is a difference, projects that are earmarked may not be strictly local. For example, a legislator who has (or wants) a strong base of support among educators or technology companies might add an earmark to the budget that funds a pet project of one of those constituencies.

Two Failed Strategies

In modern U.S. history, there have been two major attempts to curb or cure pork-barrel politics.

However, the line-item veto has been adopted in 44 states, allowing governors to remove earmarks from state spending bills.