Citizens Against Government Waste say that pork programs have risen from fewer than 2,000 a year in the mid-1990’s to almost 14,000 this year.

In the New York Times article, “An Economy Raised on Pork”, Robert Reich states “Republicans may collectively oppose wasteful spending, but as individual legislators they’ve created more pork than any Congress in history. The new $286 billion transportation act is bloated with 6,371 “special projects” with a price tag some $30 billion more than the White House wanted. The president reassured the nation that it would, at the least, “give hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs.” The new $12.3 billion energy bill cost twice what the White House sought because it’s laden with what Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who ushered it through Congress, defends as measures to create “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”