Republican hypocrites: GOP budget cutters are hawks - until it comes to trimming their own pork.

In March, 11 rank-and-file house Republicans -- the kind with revolution running through their veins -- bolted their party to defeat a measure increasing committee budgets by more than $20 million. At the time, Oklahoma sophomore Steve Largent said the vote was a matter of fiscal conscience. Mark Souder of Indiana declared that Republicans hadn't been sent to Washington to increase spending. And Arizona's Matt Salmon claimed that the dissenting group, which included Lindsey Graham and Bob Inglis of South Carolina, wanted to "inject some courage" into the Republican leadership. "The GOP," he insisted, "must resist the temptation to return to the tax-and-spend ways of the Democrats."

What these budget-balancing cops on Capitol Hill didn't say, though, was that they too had recently asked the federal government for hundreds of millions of dollars for parochial projects -- in essence, for the very pork they have consistently paraded against. Indeed, only one month earlier, Salmon had requested $130 million from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for a light-rail line in his district, while Souder had sought $122 million for highways. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, another defector, put in for $594 million for his constituents in western Michigan. And Graham and Inglis, who once compared deficit spending to alcohol dependency, asked the chairman of the Interior subcommittee of Appropriations to quadruple President clinton's budget request for an upstate conservation project to $6 million.

If these were the most conspicuous ideological flip-flops, they were not the most brazen. A month after the vote, former Seattle Seahawks football star Steve "fiscal conscience" Largent, who chastised Speaker Newt Gingrich for backing off tax cuts during budget negotiations, endorsed a tax increase on licensed sportswear and souvenirs to pay for a new Seahawks stadium. What was normally taboo for the congressman suddenly became for the Hall of Fame receiver "an innovative solution to a tough funding problem."

Of course, pork-barrel spending and fiscal hypocrisy are as old as the legislative branch itself: Abraham Lincoln spent much of his single term in the House trying to finagle money for river and harbor projects in Illinois. And, more recently, when Democrats were in power, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd diverted $1 billion to West Virginia in less than two years, including $75 million to rebuild a radio telescope. But this GOP Congress was supposed to be different. When Republicans took control of the House in 1994, for the first time in four decades, Gingrich announced that the federal government was going on a diet. The historic change, he wrote in his Contract with America, meant the end of government that is "too big" and "too easy with the public's money."

Yet now, even as Republicans celebrate the balanced budget agreement they reached with President Clinton in May, some are already gorging on pork. Sen. Phil Gramm, who denounced the budget plan and his party for not cutting spending enough, introduced a $16 million program to combat fire ants in Texas. And Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi -- who won $1.3 billion in 1995 for a helicopter carrier ship the Navy hadn't requested -- reportedly threatened the Navy with retribution earlier this year for not finding a shipbuilding contract for his hometown yard. Even a supplemental appropriations bill to provide emergency relief to flood victims nationwide this spring was polluted with pork: $21 million for, among other things, an alternative fuel shuttle bus fleet at Yosemite National Park; $12.6 million for completion of the William H. Natcher Bridge in Kentucky (named after the frugal former congressman); $2.5 million for digital maps in California's San Joaquin Valley; and $250,000 to replace salmon fry killed during an April snowstorm in New England.

One of the most glaring symbols of the revolutionaries' abandonment their fiscal fanaticism is the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal-era agency that, after 60 years, still enjoys an annual $100 million federal subsidy for its non-power operations. This appropriation -- for flood control, navigation maintenance, and land management -- has repeatedly been targeted for elimination by Rep. John Kasich, the obsessive deficit-trimming head of the House Budget Committee. The conservative Heritage Foundation also wants to sell the agency off Even TVA's own chairman, Craven Crowell, announced earlier this year a plan to sever the agency's financial ties to the federal government by fiscal year 1999, saying it would help reduce the deficit.

But lawmakers from the seven-state Southeastern region serviced by TVA -- including hard-line House and Senate opponents of the New Deal -- balked. A testy Zach Wamp of Tennessee, one of last year's 73 GOP lieutenants, defended TVA to appropriators as "an asset owned by all Americans," and devised a plan to protect its subsidy indefinitely. His classmate, Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, where TVA oversees the recreation area Land of the Lakes, attacked Crowell. And Tennessee's normally fiscally conservative senators, Fred Thompson and Bill Frist, reverted to stalling tactics, asking the General Accounting Office and congressional committees to study the issue. After weeks of pummeling, Crowell finally reversed himself and said he would support federal funding for now. GOP Rep. Scott Klug of Wisconsin, who introduced an amendment last year to kill TVA'S appropriation, observes: "We passed a welfare reform bill that essentially told people that they had to stand on their own feet after two years. How can anybody with a straight face make the argument that TVA needs another 60?"

Yet plenty of Republicans are making this kind of argument -- and not just about TVA. Overall, since the GOP revolution began amid the fanfare of fiscal conservatism in 1995, the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste has identified nearly $27 billion in pork-barrel projects. Even traditionally pro-republican groups are getting restless: Analysts at the Heritage Foundation released a report in March ridiculing $100 billion in "corporate welfare," and the conservative Weekly Standard depicted a bewildered elephant on its cover in June with the heading, "The Clueless GOP."

All this pork drains the federal Treasury largely for parochial rather than national interests; and it's rich with hypocrisy. But the real problem is that, at a time when GOP deficit-trimmers are saving money by slashing social programs, they are pilfering from a smaller pot. So $16 million to fight fire ants could be $16 million for public education or food stamps. "If people protect special projects and interests," says Arizona Sen. John McCain, a renowned Republican porkbuster, "then it's hard for them to have credibility when we have to make reductions in certain social programs." Nor are liberal Democrats without blame. While touting themselves as the party of the poor, they too are pickpocketing the federal purse for old-fashioned pork. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle recently handed over $2.7 million for the animal resource wing at South Dakota State University -- his alma mater.

The Politics of Pork

If there was a turning point for the radical revolutionaries of 1994, it was the elections of 1996. Wary that Democrats would regain House control after only two years in the minority, re-election-conscious Republicans returned to one of the oldest means of winning votes: buying them. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Newt Gingrich sent a memo to appropriators urging them to give special consideration to projects requested by their vulnerable freshmen. As a result, Phil English of Pennsylvania won $3.3 million for courthouse construction in his hometown of Erie, while Frank Riggs of California got $34 million for energy and water projects and another $14 million for local buses. Meanwhile, Gingrich -- an avid science-education advocate and admirer of dinosaurs -- earmarked $13 million in the Veterans Administration/housing and Urban Development bill for the Museum of Natural History in New York. A bipartisan team of House porkbusters stripped it from the bill, but $8 million reappeared in the conference report. "It's like David against Goliath," says a House Democratic aide who scours appropriations bills for such things.

In total, lawmakers of both parties brought home $14.5 billion in bacon in the 1996 election year -- a 16 percent increase over the previous year, according to the 1997 Congressional Pig Book, published by Citizens Against Government Waste. Granted, some of the 13 annual appropriations bills, including Foreign Operations, Defense, and Transportation, contained scaled-back pork. But in others, like the Treasury/postal bill, pork ballooned as much as 122 percent from 1995, CAGW said.

This year, things may only get worse. As tax revenues swell and the ardor of the GOP die-hards diminishes, what began as only a few pieces of pork appears to be turning into a whole roast pig. One of the largest troughs in town is the House Transportation Committee, charged with divvying up as much as $175 billion for roads, bridges and rail systems in every state for the next six years. It is no coincidence that the already-swollen panel has grown to 73 members, making it the largest committee in congressional history. Not surprisingly, most of its newcomers are those Republican and Democratic freshmen who won narrowly in 1996, and are hoping a federal check for a local cause will help shore up their base in 1998. The panel has received a record 1,500 project requests from about 90 percent of House lawmakers -- even from members like Rep. Salmon, who supports devolution of spending authority to the states, and GOP sophomore Mark Neumann, who says of earmarking, "Don't do it, but if you do, just be fair to Wisconsin." According to The Washington Post, of the 84 House lawmakers who were elected with 55 percent of the vote or less and who supported the balanced budget in May, half also voted for the $12 billion in additional transportation spending that nearly derailed the plan. "It's 95 percent pork," contends Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy at the CATO Institute, a conservative think tank. "Are there some legitimate highway demonstration projects? Maybe five or six a year." Adds Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois, who claims he never came to Congress to abolish bacon anyway, "Of course it's pork."

And the 1998 appropriations process has barely even begun.

Deep Denial

The first sign of an addiction, of course, is denying you have one. "I don't see it as [pork]," explained Rep. Inglis of his $6 million request for land acquisition in South Carolina. (Instead, it's a "unique opportunity.") "These are good projects, not pork," declared then-Illinois freshman Michael Patrick Flanagan, referring to $25 million that was earmarked for Chicago waterfront repairs and transit projects during his unsuccessful re-election campaign last year. "I don't think we ought to perceive everyone who has a need in their district as lining up at the trough," contended Georgia sophomore Bob Barr, who supports the new $198 million F-22 fighter planes being built at taxpayers' expense in his district.

Indeed, GOP lawmakers staunchly defend their projects as essential investments, often in the name of national security or sound infrastructure. In some instances, they have a case. Florida Sen. Connie Mack, for example, who is fighting the practice of transportation earmarks, shot off a letter to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman McCain in April protesting staff cuts at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables and the closure of the National Weather Service's southern headquarters. "Emergency planners in my state -- and even some of the staff at the National Weather Service -- are worried that these changes could result in loss of life and property in Florida and throughout the Southeast," the senator wrote.

He could be right. But even the revolutionaries have learned that draping pork in the cloak of the country's national defense is often the easiest way to protect it. That's how Gingrich justifies his plug for the F-22 -- it's mere coincidence that 1,100 assembly workers in his native Marietta, Ga., depend on its construction for their livelihood.

Another time-tested trick is to share the pork-barrel high. In the case of the B-2 bomber, construction contracts are sprinkled throughout congressional districts all across the country -- literally. Still, in other instances, projects are slipped in simply to feed a pork-junkie's lonely craving: like the time House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston of Louisiana secured nearly $1 billion in the 1995 defense bill for an amphibious landing ship that once again, the Navy hadn't even asked for; or when the hawkish chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Pete Domenici, won a $17.1 million appropriation last year for advanced laser research and logistics administration facilities at two military bases in New Mexico. "It's gone from tragedy to parody," says McCain.

Nevertheless, Republicans insist they're successfully shrinking the deficit and bringing the budget into balance. "We are winning the war," says Rep. Neumann, "even though we're losing some of the skirmishes." Of course, Neumann can't afford to criticize lost "skirmishes" in the battle against pork: It just so happens that the co-chairman of the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition inserted language into the 1995 defense bill that barred companies using foreign parts from bidding on generators for certain navy submarines -- language that just so happened to infuriate the Navy, and just so happened to benefit one of the largest employers in his district.