You're not invited to the pork fest.

Arab is an Alabama town of slightly more than 7,000 people located 30 miles south of Huntsville. As in hundreds of small rural towns throughout the United States, much of Arab's population is elderly: The last census reported nearly 1,000 Arab residents to be more than 70 years old. Its senior center, open weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., offers a daily program of line dancing, gospel singing, and a subsidized lunch.

In 2004, Arab's senior center will very likely be replaced by a nice new building, the cost of which is to be shared among you, me, and all other American taxpayers. That's because Arab, Alabama, is targeted for a special line item in the mammoth Consolidated Appropriations Act which was on its way to congressional adoption at press time. Specifically, the GOP-dominated conference committee that ironed out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill last fall instructed the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to award a $400,000 Economic Development grant to Arab specifically for the construction of the new senior center.

Arab's grant represents $400,000 in HUD money that will be unavailable for competitive applications for economic development. It will also prevent Arab's town council from applying for a federal grant for any other worthy purpose--support, for example, of expansion of long-term care access. That earmarked $400,000 appropriation will raise a red flag on any competitive grant application from that town.

Arab is not alone. Most of the hundreds of pages of the conference report for the Consolidated Appropriations Act consist of instructions to federal agencies to award money to specific churches, charities, businesses, and local governments. A sample of the thousands of grants specified in the conference report includes:

* $225,000 for a group of Kentucky businessmen to develop a Blue-Gray Civil War Theme Park.

* $25,000 for an organization called Security On Campus, Inc., in King of Prussia, Pennyslvania, to distribute pamphlets on the danger of drinking and driving.

* $100,000 to renovate the Seldom Seen Mine in Patton, Pennsylvania, to permit display of mining equipment to visitors.

* $200,000 to continue renovations to the Holt Hotel in Wichita Falls, Texas.

* $250,000 for St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham, Washington, "to implement a model for improving care for patients with chronic diseases."

In each case, a congressman or senator assigned to the House-Senate appropriations conference committee has ordered the specific local project to be financed by a grant from a federal agency, with no competitive review.

The earmarked funds usually are taken from federal programs that are designed to address national issues. For example, of the $44 million to be issued by the HUD Neighborhood Initiative program in fiscal year 2004, more than $43 million has been reserved by influential congressmen for 47 specific, earmarked grants. In healthcare appropriations, however, there was too little money in existing programs to satisfy the desire of congressmen to bestow their generosity on local projects. For this reason, the conference committee report includes language that was not included in either the House or Senate versions of the appropriations bill, providing $367 million for construction and renovation of healthcare facilities and for other health-related activities. The earmarked funds in this hastily created healthcare slush fund range from $1 million to Geisinger Hospital in Pennsylvania to a paltry $100,000 for the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Long-term care facilities did not do well in the earmark sweepstakes. In fact, only one of the thousands of "pork barrel" grants authorized by the handful of congressmen who crafted the conference report was devoted to a long-term care: $275,000 for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota to construct a new nursing home. Hospitals, in contrast, are scheduled to rake in millions of dollars in earmarked grants in Pennsylvania, for example, no fewer than 16 hospitals will be given grants for "stabilizing the workforce for clinical care." In other words, the same federal legislators who insist that the United States cannot afford to reimburse nursing homes for the costs of coping with staff shortages have been delighted to earmark generous grants to specific hospitals for the same purpose.

Of course, "pork barrel politics" in Washington began long before the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act. Ear-marking at least a few specific recipients for federal grants has been viewed as a legislative perk for more than half a century. The practice has normally been restrained, however, by an appropriations process that was divided among more than a dozen separate pieces of legislation. In 2003, however, the Republican majority didn't even seriously try this approach. The result was a gigantic spending bill written by a handful of congressmen assigned by the GOP leadership to the House-Senate conference committee. These two dozen legislators larded the resulting legislation with wholesale distribution of earmarked "pork barrel" grants intended to help congressional incumbents win re-election.

In more prosperous times, the inclusion of earmarked grants in federal appropriations bills represented a nuisance. There was plenty of money remaining in healthcare and economic development programs, for example, to allow eligible nursing homes to compete with other facilities for federal grants. In the 2004 appropriations, however, long-term care facilities have no chance to apply for the financial largesse available to individual hospitals, developers, and local charities that were lucky enough to catch the attention, one way or another, of these powerful legislators.

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