EDITORIAL: A cornucopia of pork just in time for Christmas

On Tuesday, the Senate and House appropriations committee released a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill to fund government operations through next September. As so often happens in Washington, lawmakers aimed to rush the bill through both chambers of Congress ridiculously within days so that it would be ready for the president’s desk by Friday.

It’s a hastily compiled stopgap measure, which is how a dysfunctional Congress now handles budget policy.

Few of the politicians who vote in favor of the measure will actually know what’s in it. But a handful of critics and elected officials have gone through the legislation. Not surprisingly, they’ve discovered a cornucopia of pork and waste just in time for Christmas.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason notes that the omnibus bill earmarks $750,000 for fire alarm modernization at the Metropolitan Opera, $3 million for an LGBTQ museum in New York and more than $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail and authorizes the creation of a Ukrainian Independence Park. The bill also directs $200 million to the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund and $7.5 million for the study of “the domestic radicalization phenomenon.”

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., tweeted that Electoral College changes, IRS retirement reforms, cosmetics regulation, health care policies and even horse racing rules are “all jammed in under the guise of a ‘government funding bill.’”

That’s not all that’s fishy. Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., reveals that the word “salmon” appears in the bill 48 times, with $65 million earmarked for Pacific coastal salmon recovery, as well as an additional $5 million for studying the impacts of culverts, roads and bridges on salmon populations. There’s also $65.7 million set aside for international fisheries commissions.

Rep. Bishop also highlights the bill’s provisions of “$3 million for bee-friendly highways,” $1.438 billion to be part of global multilateral organizations, and “$410 million toward border security for Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Oman.” The bill does not set aside anything for U.S. border security.

Rep. Johnson has a radical idea. He believes that “funding for each government agency and changes to each of these unrelated policies should require their own full, open debate in committee and on the floor with the opportunity to make amendments.”

He also surmises that most, if not all, of the unrelated policies in the bill would fail to pass on their own, which is why the bill is being forced on lawmakers at the eleventh hour before anyone has to time read it, let alone debate or amend it. “This is clearly not how lawmaking is to supposed to work,” he adds.

Yet it will remain commonplace inside the Beltway as long as voters look the other way.