Feeding at the transportation trough.

ITEM: The Los Angeles Times for August 11 reported: "President Bush signed the $286.5-billion transportation bill Wednesday, saying it would ease traffic congestion throughout the country, create hundreds of thousands of jobs and impose stricter vehicular safety standards that would save lives."

"'Our economy depends on us having the most efficient, reliable transportation system in the world,' Bush said.... But 'highways just don't happen,' the president said. 'People have got to show up and do the work to refit a highway or build a bridge, and the)' need new equipment to do so. So the bill I'm signing is going to help give hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs.'"

ITEM: The New York Times for August 11 reported: "Mr. Bush had threatened to veto the transportation legislation if its cost was too high, and he had initially set the line at $284 billion."

CORRECTION: The president repeatedly drew lines in the sand over the cost, promising a veto if that limit was passed, then retreated when the supposed cutoff point was left behind. Unnoted in the New York Times report, he had previously vowed to reject any bill over $256 billion. Subsequently, $270 billion was going to be the limit. This summer, the president said he wouldn't swallow more than $284 billion, and then did so. Nevertheless, he boasted about the bill's passage.

The transportation bill will no doubt prove to be even more expensive than the mammoth $286.5 billion mentioned above. To disguise the apparent expense, Congress added a budgetary ruse called a "rescission," amounting to more than $8.5 billion. Thus, the bill's actual spending authority is $295 billion, with Congress saying it might "take back" $8.5 billion from the states in 2009. "Nobody believes that's going to happen," said a dissenting Representative Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). "It's frankly a pretty transparent gimmick."

The bill is a headlong surrender from even an appearance of stewardship. Consider that not long ago, in the 2002 transportation bill, Congress added some 1,400 "earmarks" (pork projects tossed in by members of Congress). Those earmarks, reeking at a level of $3.2 billion, were widely viewed as outrageous. The White House, commented columnist Dale McFeatters, "declared war on them as wasteful and inefficient in its fiscal 2003 budget." Well, that battle didn't go very well--since this year's bill has 6,371 earmarks, totaling $24 billion.

The earmarks include countless projects more appropriately handled at the state and local level (if officials there didn't laugh them off the docket). Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe enumerated a few. including horse-riding facilities in Virginia ($600,000); a snowmobile trail in Vermont ($5.9 million); and a day-care center and park-and-ride facility in Illinois ($1.25 million).

The "Magnetic Levitation Transportation System" between Las Vegas and Primm, Nevada, is in line for $20 million. There's another $20 million for a small ferry service from the Port Sonoma Marina in California's Bay Area. As the local Daily Review put it, that ferry "appears on no plan, not even those being drafted by the new Bay Area Water Transit Authority, which is charged with developing a region-wide ferry network."

Alaska reaps almost a billion dollars for more than a hundred such earmarked projects, representing about $1,500 for each man, woman, and child in the state. Among these, gallingly, is $3 million for a movie showing how Alaska spends highway funds.

It isn't happenstance that Alaska is seemingly swimming in the pork barrel; the chairman of the House Transportation Committee is Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). He saw to it that $231 million was earmarked for a Knik Arm bridge to be called "Don Young's Way." Another earmark for a Ketchikan bridge also raised more than a few eyebrows. Whereas it is now possible to take a seven-minute ferry ride to and from the island of Gravina (population 50), Young thought it would be nice to have a mile-long bridge between the island and the mainland. This is more than the span of the Golden Gate. Federal taxpayers will pay over $220 million for this featherbrained notion.

To add financial insult to unconstitutional injury, the Anchorage Daily News reported that the earmarked federal funds won't cover the complete cost of either bridge, further noting that more than half of the money may wind up being subtracted from the regular annual allotment to Alaska, potentially hurting other more necessary roadwork in the state.