Unrelated Items Part of Iraq Bills Since War Began

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; A03

To President Bush, they are "pork-barrel projects completely unrelated to the war," items in the House and Senate war-spending bills such as peanut storage facilities and aid to spinach farmers that insult the seriousness of the conflict and exist only to buy votes.

But such spending has been part of Iraq funding bills since the war began, sometimes inserted by the president himself, sometimes added by lawmakers with bipartisan aplomb. A few of the items may have weighed on the votes for spending bills that have now topped half a trillion dollars, but, in almost all cases over the past four years, special-interest funding provisions have been the fruits of congressional opportunism by well-placed senators or House members grabbing what they could for their constituents on the one bill that had to be passed quickly.

"Frankly, I don't see a lot of vote-buying here. And if that was what they were after in some cases, it didn't seem to work," said Scott Lilly, who was a longtime senior House Appropriations Committee aide and is now at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

The president's own request last year for emergency war spending included $20 billion for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery, $2.3 billion for bird flu preparations, and $2 billion to fortify the border with Mexico and pay for his effort to send National Guardsmen to the southern frontier.

The Republican-controlled Senate tried to load the 2006 bill with $4 billion for agricultural subsidies, $1.1 billion for the Gulf Coast fishing industry, $594 million for highway projects unrelated to Hurricane Katrina, and $700 million for rerouting a rail line in Mississippi.....