Don Young: I stuffed the bill like a turkey

Last fall, after House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, earmarked $223 million to link the remote town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) to the more remote island of Gravina (population 50), the Bridge to Nowhere became a national symbol of congressional porkmania, lampooned by Leno, Letterman and Limbaugh. It was the most brazen of the record-breaking 6,300-plus earmarks inserted by individual members of Congress into the record-breaking $286 billion transportation bill. Even Parade Magazine, not known for its muckraking, featured the project as a poster child for government waste.

Young, a 33-year House veteran, defiantly boasted that he had stuffed the bill “like a turkey.” And Stevens, a 37-year senator, furiously threatened to resign if Congress shifted money away from Gravina and another bridge to nowhere near Anchorage – a bridge actually named Don Young’s Way, near Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. But the projects became such an embarrassment to Republicans that the chairmen agreed to withdraw both earmarks. Budget hawks, green activists and clean-government types hailed the defeat of the bridges as a victory for fiscal sanity.

The bridges live on

Except that the bridges weren’t defeated.

The Republican-controlled Congress still gave Alaska the $452 million it had requested for the two bridges, merely removing the earmark directing where the state should spend the money. Republican Gov. Frank H. Murkowski, who was once Stevens’ junior colleague in the Senate, intends to spend that money on the bridges.

In Washington, pork has become synonymous with congressional earmarks; in fact, most media outlets – including the Washington Post – formally define it as such. So does the new “Pig Book,” which was released this month by Citizens Against Government Waste and catalogs 375 of last year’s goofiest earmarks, from the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative to the Sparta Teapot Museum. But outside Washington, most Americans think of pork as wasteful spending. They don’t really care whether it’s earmarked.

And they shouldn’t. Anti-pork activists cited the stuffed-like-a-turkey transportation bill generally – and its bridges to nowhere specifically – as evidence of the need for “earmark reforms,” and they managed to get a few modest ones into the otherwise toothless lobbying bill that is currently floundering in the House. But they’ve fallen into the classic Beltway trap of demanding procedural solutions to substantive problems. Congressional earmarks have nearly quadrupled in a decade, and many of them are outrageous. But earmarks don’t produce pork.

Porkers produce pork.

Murkowski’s well-connected family – his daughter Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is now Stevens’s junior colleague in the Senate – just happens to own land on Gravina. Young’s family just happens to own land that will benefit from Don Young’s Way. But the bridges to nowhere, the turkey of a transportation bill and the earmark explosion are all symptoms of much deeper problems: a Congress that essentially functions as a pork dispenser, a Congress that rarely seems to debate anything but the division of the spoils of government, a Congress that is essentially run Don Young’s Way.

Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.

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