Government watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) released the fiscal year 2024 edition of their “Pig Book” on Wednesday, chronicling what they considered the worst pork barrel spending offenders of the year.
At the announcement, held just off Capitol Hill, several anti-earmark lawmakers also offered reaction and analysis to CAGW President Tom Schatz’s proverbial lowlights of government spending.
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., a member of the House Budget Committee, characterized earmarks as lawmakers’ act of “robbing St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul – for projects that St. Petersburg doesn’t benefit from and St. Paul doesn’t seem worthy enough to spend its own money on.”
“When a local government proposes an earmark, what does it say? It’s saying that the project is so low on its priority list it doesn’t dare spend their own taxpayers’ money — But, they’re perfectly happy to have taxpayers in other communities foot the bill for them,” McClintock said.
FLASHBACK: TOP REPUBLICAN BLASTS SPENDING BILLS
McClintock claimed that the current interest payments on the U.S. national debt now exceed the Pentagon’s defense spending for the first time in history.
“And history warns us that countries that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long,” he said.
Schatz highlighted several findings by his team at CAGW, including a total of 8,222 earmarks in the past fiscal year, costing a combined $22.7 billion. That total was 11% more than FY 2023 but with a slightly lower “pork” price tag. He said interests in Alaska, Maine, Hawaii, the Northern Marianas Islands territory and West Virginia received the top five most earmarks in descending order.
One of the largest earmarks criticized by Schatz and others at the conference was a $1.75 million appropriation for “public plaza security upgrades” at the MET – the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – which CAGW found to have $5 billion in assets as of 2023.
He called out New York Democratic Sens….
