The following is a prepared statement by Steve Ellis, Vice President at Taxpayers for Common Sense on the House Energy & Water Appropriations bill:

Washington, D.C. –  Appropriators got the question half correct when they chose to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in wasteful programs at the Department of Energy (DOE). But instead of stopping there and using these savings to reduce the record federal deficit, lawmakers decided to plow all the savings into their own private pirate’s booty of election year goodies. In effect, they are rearranging the fiscal deck chairs on this titanic bill.

Big spenders in Congress have added hundreds of projects and are ignoring their fiduciary responsibility in an ongoing hunt for election year pork. Unfortunately, the only bipartisanship effort in Congress is to ignore the budget deficit crisis in this legislation and to spend well beyond our nation’s means.

Instead of focusing resources on priority projects, Congress has added funding to 678 projects at a cost of more than $700 million dollars over the administration’s request to the budget of the U.S Army Corps of Engineers. According to an analysis of the legislation by Taxpayers for Common Sense, this includes 497 new earmarks at a cost of $430 million that were not in the administration’s budget and increases in spending on another 181 projects to the tune of more than $288 million. Including administration requests, there are 1887 earmarked projects in this legislation.

Despite their complaints of tight Corps budgets from the administration, the appropriations committee found more than $87 million in new construction funding for unbudgeted wasteful projects like environmental infrastructure, desalinization and other local water works that are beyond the scope of standard Corps civil works projects. Also, appropriators added $21.25 million in beach projects not included in the administration’s budget.

About $700 million of the billion dollar increase in Energy & Water spending programs will be directed to the Corps of Engineers, whose budget would be more than $4.82 billion, a significant increase over the Bush budget. The House increased spending on some of the most wasteful boondoggles that they should have no business funding and that the Bush administration has attempted to cut.

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In effect, the budget battle lines between the Congress and the administration have been drawn. This legislation will act as a spending litmus test to see if the administration will hunker down and defend its budget or if they will let themselves be overrun by pork barrel politicians.

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The spending bill would spread $28 billion among the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and other agencies. The $22.5 billion for the Department of Energy is $669.5 million under the President’s request and $510.9 million above fiscal year 2004.

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