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...the Provincetown Art Association and Museum has used nearly $3 million in grants and loans from the Agriculture Department to add gallery space and renovate a historic sea captain's house.

...the department is financing a new actors theater in Wellfleet and recently awarded a grant to a garden center in Hyannis to build a windmill.

More than three times as much money went to metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or more ($30.3 billion) as to poor or shrinking rural counties ($8.6 billion).

...electric companies [were] awarded almost $1 billion in low-interest loans to serve the booming suburbs of Atlanta and Tampa.

An Internet provider in Houston got $23 million in loans to wire affluent subdivisions, including one that boasts million-dollar houses and an equestrian center.

In 2004, the USDA guaranteed a $1.2 million loan for a new Hyundai dealership...

The USDA's regulations determining eligible rural communities vary from program to program and are often influenced by Congress.

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CONTACT: Taxpayers for Common Sense
Keith Ashdown, 202-546-8500 ext. 110

Taxpayers for Common Sense: Emergency Spending Bill Pays For Political Pork

WASHINGTON -- March 3 -- The House emergency spending bill contains billions of dollars in spending to refill depleted defense accounts for Iraq and Afghanistan that were cut in this year's defense spending bill to make room a record increase in local pork projects, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan budget watchdog organization.

"They have been robbing Peter to pay for pork," said Keith Ashdown, Vice President of Policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense. "The end result is that we end up paying billions more for this mammoth emergency spending bill that creates a crater-sized hole in the budget deficit." If enacted, this supplemental spending bill will bring the cost of the War on Terror to more than $275 billion.

In an analysis released today, Taxpayers for Common Sense found that the defense bill contained 2,671 earmarks worth $12.2 billion, both record highs. To pay for this largesse, House lawmakers cut $2.2 billion in funds for operations and maintenance and other readiness accounts that pay for the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all, largely through the use of budgetary gimmicks, the House cut $8.5 billion out of defense accounts in the entire bill.

These cuts in important readiness accounts made room for thousands of projects inserted at the request of individual lawmakers, including $1.9 million for a Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Celebration, $1.5 million for a virtual reality spray paint simulator system, and $1 million for a biathlon trail upgrade at Fort Richardson, Alaska. Representatives sitting on the Appropriations Committee reaped the lion's share of benefits.

"Smoke and mirrors budgeting has obscured the true 'emergency' cost of the War on Terror," continued Ashdown. "Essentially, we are paying back money we cut from the defense bill to subsidize Congress' addiction to pork."

Moving money to the supplemental with one hand and adding parochial interest funding with the other is an end run around the budgetary process. Lawmakers get to put out a bill that looks fiscally responsible, when, in reality, they have simply set us up for a bigger emergency spending bill. "They are trying to have their cake and eat it too." Ashdown said, "This is an attempt to increase the size of the defense bill, while ignoring any budget discipline and claiming that they are being fiscally responsible."

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Modern American politics has been described as a duopoly since the Republican and Democratic parties have dominated and framed policy debate as well as the public discourse on matters of national concern for about a century and a half. Third Parties have encountered various obstacles to getting onto ballots at different levels of government, more so in recent decades.