Congress released this year’s Congressional Pig Book in May, and the top line is $23.7 billion spread across 8,392 earmarks, the fourth-highest total since anyone started keeping score in 1991. That’s already a lot of money. But the number that actually made me stop scrolling wasn’t the total. It was the door.
Senator Chuck Schumer secured $1.5 million for a new entrance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is sitting on $5.8 billion in net assets. Somebody still decided taxpayers should chip in for the front door.
That one line item is basically the whole argument. I’m not anti-tax. I’m fine paying for roads, first responders, libraries, utilities, the stuff that actually holds a community together, and I don’t lose sleep over it. What gets me is watching politicians talk about “revenue problems” while quietly funding a door for a museum that could buy a small country outright. That’s not a tax shortfall. That’s a spending discipline problem, and pretending otherwise is how we end up back here every single year.
This isn’t a one-party story either, which is exactly what makes it worse. Mitch McConnell landed $20 million for improvements to a Kentucky parkway. Chris Coons steered $950,000 across two earmarks for opera houses. Patty Murray topped the Senate with 96 earmarks worth $484.6 million. Chuck Fleischmann led the House with 14 earmarks worth $250 million on his own. Red state, blue state, red team, blue team, doesn’t matter. Everybody’s got a project, and everybody’s got a tidy explanation for why theirs is the important one.
Nobody campaigns on opera funding or museum doors. They campaign on fixing roads and helping veterans and bringing jobs home. Then the actual bill shows up months later with line items nobody would vote for individually if you asked them plainly, all of it wrapped inside a package too big for anyone to read before the vote. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.
I know the counterargument: $23.7 billion is a rounding error against a federal budget measured in trillions. Sure, technically. But that’s exactly the trick. Waste this size only looks small because the baseline is already enormous, and “it’s a small percentage” is how a couple hundred billion dollars a year survives every budget fight without anyone getting fired over it. A company that burned a few billion on stuff nobody asked for would face a shareholder revolt by Monday. Taxpayers just get told to be reasonable about it.
None of this means taxes are evil or that government shouldn’t fund anything shared. It means the people asking for more of my money should have to explain the museum door first, out loud, on camera, before the next ask.
Two cents: close the loopholes, cut the pork, and earn the next dollar before you ask for another one.