Citizens Against Government Waste

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Pork Alert: Senate Homeland Insecurity

Washington, D.C. - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released its preliminary analysis of the Senate version of the Fiscal 2009 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Appropriations Act. There are 17 projects for a total of $133 million in this year’s Senate DHS bill. To paraphrase an earlier classic quote by Senate appropriator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security made out “like a bandit” on this bill; 92 percent of the total appropriated funds, or nearly $123 million, went to members of the Subcommittee.

The following are some outrageous examples of pork that senators added to the Homeland Security bill:

• $39.7 million for the Advanced Training Center, which trains border agents, by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), although the Bush Administration has not requested funding to expand the center. Sen. Byrd requested and received the same amount for the project in fiscal year 2008.

• $27 million by Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee member Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) for the Southeast Region Research Initiative in Tennessee. The website for this program has no white papers or reports of their research available, only project descriptions.

• $22.3 million by Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) for the National Center for Critical Information Processing and Storage in Mississippi, which “seeks to consolidate and safely store information critical to the operations of the federal government.”

• $4.5 million by Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) for the 2010 Olympics Coordination Center in Bellingham, Washington. According to Sen. Murray’s website, the Center “would allow federal, state, and local officials to meet, prepare and coordinate a response to any incident from one location.” Although the Olympics will be held in Vancouver, Canada, “the Center would only be twenty-three miles away from the Canadian border, as opposed to 110 miles to Seattle or 155 miles to the Washington State Military Department.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.