Capital's New Four-Letter Word

The movement's ideological roots range from liberal to libertarian. Taxpayers for Common Sense, created 10 years ago, regards the late former senator William Proxmire (D-Wis.) as its spiritual leader and has taken over his Golden Fleece Award, created in 1975 to highlight wasteful projects. Proxmire gave the National Science Foundation the first Golden Fleece, for spending $84,000 to study why people fall in love.

Citizens Against Government Waste was founded in 1984 by the industrialist J. Peter Grace and the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, now both deceased. It is also the legacy of President Ronald Reagan's "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control," directed in 1982 to "work like tireless bloodhounds to root out government inefficiency and waste of tax dollars." Other groups include the National Taxpayers Union, founded in 1969, which has already set its sights on the farm bill that expires in 2007.

The groups' bread and butter are the vast databases they compile that break down earmarks by state or individual lawmaker. They also rely on tips.

About five years ago, an Alaska environmentalist contacted Keith Ashdown at Taxpayers for Common Sense about a proposal for a massive bridge that would have linked the town of Ketchikan to the more sparsely populated Gravina Island. The group spent more than a year examining the project and awarded it a Golden Fleece on June 12, 2003.

Even Ashdown was surprised when the final highway authorization bill emerged last summer with a whopping $223 million for the Ketchikan bridge. At most, he had expected a few million dollars.

The bridge attracted a blizzard of adverse publicity, and later last year, Congress redirected the money to allow Alaska to spend it on other transportation projects. Ashdown, meanwhile, has moved on to a new project.

He heard about this one from a Gulf Coast resident. According to the e-mail he received, Mississippi wants to spend more than $200 million to repair the U.S. 90 Biloxi Bay Bridge, which was damaged last summer by Hurricane Katrina.

But the bridge could be obsolete before it is finished, the tipster warned, pending the outcome of a debate over relocating the highway. Ashdown is looking into the project and already has a name for it: the "Bridge Over Troubled Waters."