Pork-barrel spending continues to be a long-honored Washington tradition. Year after year, politicians debase the political process by inserting personal projects into appropriations and authorization bills to try to win favor back home. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has documented more than $100 billion in appropriations pork since 1991.

Pork is the funding of a project that trips one of CAGW's seven criteria: requested by only one chamber of Congress; not specifically authorized; not awarded competitively; not requested by the President; greatly exceeds the President's budget request or the previous year's funding; not the subject of congressional hearings; or serves only a local or special interest. In short, pork-barreling is the appropriation of money in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.

Examples of pork-barrel spending in fiscal year 2000 include:

• $375,000,000 for an unrequested and unneeded amphibious assault ship in the state of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.);

• $700,000 for the Admiral Theater in Bremerton, Washington, the district of House appropriator Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), despite a $4.2 million privately-funded facelift; and

• $500,000 for the Olympic Tree Program in the state of Senate appropriator Robert Bennett for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Many dismiss pork as a drop in the bucket in relation to the size of the federal budget. The pro-porkers claim that the real problem is entitlement spending, so pork is insignificant. This dismissal of pork as "small potatoes" ignores the fact that pork is the root cause of some of our nation's most debilitating fiscal and political pathologies, and $100 billion shouldn't be considered insignificant in anyone's book.

Appropriations bills are not the only places where pork shows up. The 1999 Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21) is a prime example of a pork-laden authorization bill. Demonstration projects totaling $9.3 billion were incorporated into the final TEA-21 to ensure a solid support base for passage. "National priority" transportation projects funded in TEA-21 include a parking garage, a pedestrian walkway, and highway beautification.

Pork-barrel spending amounts to nothing more than bribe-taking, where politicians use their constituents' tax dollars to support their reelection. It's a game of hide-and-seek that harms our representative form of democracy and threatens our fiscal stability.