Unrelated Items Part of Iraq Bills Since War Began

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.

In the face of a veto threat, many of those programs fell out of the final bill. But there were some noteworthy survivors, said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, including $176 million to rebuild an Armed Forces retirement home in Mississippi that critics called absurdly overpriced, $500 million for agriculture relief, an extra $1 billion for community-development block grants, and $118 million for reviving the Gulf Coast fishing industry.

That fishing industry is getting a second shot this year, with $120 million in the House-passed war-spending bill earmarked for shrimp and menhaden fishermen. This earmark has earned the public scorn of Republicans.

The 2005 emergency war-spending bill included $70 million for aid to Ukraine and other former Soviet states; $12.3 million for the Architect of the Capitol, in part to build an off-site delivery facility for the Capitol police; $24 million for the Forest Service to repair flood and landslide damage; and $104 million for watershed protection -- the lion's share meant for repairing the damage to waterways in Washington County, Utah, at the request of the state's Republican senators.

The fight this year over $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fisheries in the Gulf, $74 million for peanut storage facilities in Georgia, and $25 million for California spinach farmers devastated by an E. coli scare is louder than past disputes but is substantively not much different, budget analysts said. Virtually all of the $3.4 billion in agriculture spending in the House bill had been worked out by farm-state lawmakers long before Democratic leaders settled on the Iraq troop-pullout language at the center of the White House's showdown with Congress, Lilly said.

"These war supplemental bills have always had wasteful domestic spending added," Riedl said. "The difference is only in magnitude."