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Pork barrel, or simplypork, is ametaphor forallocating government spending to localized projects in the representative'sdistrict or for securing direct expenditures primarily serving the sole interests of the representative. The usage originated inAmerican English, and it indicates a negotiated way ofpolitical particularism.
Scholars usepork barrel as a technical term regarding legislative control of local appropriations.[1][2] In election campaigns, the term is used in derogatory fashion to attack opponents. Typically, "pork" involves national funding for government programs whose economic or service benefits are concentrated in a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers.Public works projects, certain national defense spending projects, andagricultural subsidies are the most commonly cited examples.Citizens Against Government Waste, afiscally conservative advocacy group, outlines seven criteria by which spending in the United States can be classified as "pork":[3]
The termpork barrel politics originated inAmerican English,[4] and usually refers to spending intended to benefitconstituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form ofcampaign contributions or votes. In the popular 1863 story "The Children of the Public",Edward Everett Hale used the termpork barrel as a homely metaphor for any form of public spending to the citizenry;[5] however, after theAmerican Civil War, the term came to be used in a derogatory sense. TheOxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term to 1910.[6]
Pork barrels originally came from storing meat.[7] By the 1870s, references to "pork" were common in Congress, and the term was further popularized by a 1919 article by Chester Collins Maxey in theNational Municipal Review, which reported on certain legislative acts known to members of Congress as "pork barrel bills". He claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving enslaved people a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout.[8] More generally, a barrel ofsalt pork was a commonlarder item in 19th-century households and could be used as a measure of the family's financial well-being. For example, in his 1845 novelThe Chainbearer,James Fenimore Cooper wrote: "I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel."[9]
An early example of pork barrel politics in the United States was theBonus Bill of 1817, which was introduced byDemocratic-RepublicanJohn C. Calhoun to constructhighways linking the Eastern and Southern United States to itsWestern frontier using the earnings bonus from theSecond Bank of the United States. Calhoun argued for it using general welfare and post-roads clauses of theUnited States Constitution. Although he approved of the economic development goal, PresidentJames Madison vetoed the bill asunconstitutional.
One of the most famous alleged pork-barrel projects was theBig Dig inBoston,Massachusetts. The Big Dig was a project to relocate an existing 3.5-mile (5.6 km) section of theInterstate Highway System underground. The official planning phase started in 1982; the construction was done between 1991 and 2006, and the project concluded on December 31, 2007. It ended up costing US$14.6billion, or over US$4 billion per mile.[10]Tip O'Neill (D-Mass), after whom one of the Big Dig tunnels was named, pushed to have the Big Dig funded by the federal government while he was thespeaker of the United States House of Representatives.[11]
During the2008 United States presidential election campaign, theGravina Island Bridge (also known as the "Bridge to Nowhere") in Alaska was cited as an example of pork barrel spending. The bridge, pushed for by Republican SenatorTed Stevens, was projected to cost $398 million and would connect the island's 50 residents and theKetchikan International Airport toRevillagigedo Island andKetchikan.[12]
Pork-barrel projects, which differ fromearmarks, are added to the federal budget by members of the appropriation committees of theUnited States Congress. This allows the delivery of federal funds to the local district or state of the appropriation committee member, often accommodating major campaign contributors. To a certain extent, a member of Congress is judged by their ability to deliver funds to their constituents. The Chairman and theranking member of theUnited States Senate Committee on Appropriations are in a position to deliver significant benefits to their states. Researchers Anthony Fowler and Andrew B. Hall claim that this still does not account for the high reelection rates of incumbent representatives in American legislatures.[13] Former Hawaii SenatorDaniel Inouye described himself as "the No. 1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress".[14] Inouye regularly passed earmarks for funding in the state of Hawaii including military and transportation spending.[15]
