Targeting wasteful government spending that harms the environment, the Green Scissors Campaign generated nationwide media coverage and praise for its new report released January 21. The report, Green Scissors ’98, recommends slashing almost $50 billion in unnecessary and inefficient programs.

Released in over 70 locations from coast to coast, Green Scissors ’98 garnered significant radio, TV (including CSPAN), and print coverage (including USA Today). If Congress followed the Green Scissors recommendations, “the wildlife and wetlands would be as grateful as taxpayers,” editorialized the Daily Herald of suburban Chicago.

The Green Scissors Campaign, led by Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, unites organizations representing more than 8.5 million taxpayers and environmentalists to cut wasteful government spending that harms the environment. The coalition’s 4th annual report recommends cutting 71 federal programs ranging from tobacco subsidies to coal research and development. Programs targeted in Green Scissors ‘98 include: the 1872 Mining Law which gives away public land with billions of dollars of gold and other minerals under it to companies that pay no royalties; subsidized road construction for logging companies in National Forests; and 20 new programs such as Tongass National Forest logging, highway demonstration projects, and the International Monetary Fund quota increase.

Since 1995, the Green Scissors Campaign has helped eliminate more than a dozen programs, cutting over $20 billion in wasteful and environmentally harmful spending programs. For example, for the first time in more than 40 years, not a single taxpayer dollar will be spent on dangerous, expensive commercial nuclear research and development.

Programs targeted in Green Scissors ‘98 threaten America’s future through economic and environmental destruction. They often conflict directly with other federal policies, benefit people or institutions that Congress did not originally intend, and leave taxpayers holding the bill. Cutting these programs will require political leaders to put aside partisan differences and break with the pork-barrel politics that reign in Washington.