NCPA Government and Politics Issues - How Congress Protected Pork In The Highway Bill

Government and Politics Issues

How Congress Protected Pork In The Highway Bill

The massive bill authorizing spending on highways and mass transit enacted into law earlier this year was written in such a way that none of the projects in it, including 1,850 individual projects lawmakers inserted in the bill, could be taken out later. Thus it forestalls future challenges to hundreds of highway pork barrel projects in the "Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century," commonly called "iced tea" (ISTEA).

By the tradition of the House, the appropriations committees that write the various bills to fund the government have since at least 1875 had the prerogative of changing the spending levels put in by authorizing committees.

But Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, stood nearly 100 years of House tradition on its head by inserting language in the ISTEA bill making it out of order to consider legislation that would cause spending for any of the projects to be reduced.

Shuster reportedly saw it as a way to keep appropriators from meddling with the broader policy goals of using money from the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways and mass transit exclusively.

But his ploy "went beyond normal procedures," in the opinion of House Rules Committee Chairman Gerald B. H. Solomon -- who has had to confirm that, for now, "it's the law."

One alleged beneficiary of the "Shuster Rule" is Donald Trump, the New York real estate magnate, who wants $300 million in federal highway funds to re-route a stretch of the city's West Side Highway, sink it underground and reconnect it so as not to interfere with the view of the Hudson River from a mammoth apartment complex he has planned.

Source: Juliet Eilperin, "Highway Bill Lets Shuster Play His Trump Card," Washington Post, August 6, 1998.

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