What are pork barrel projects? It is when politicians secure public money for projects in their home constituencies in order to get support and be reelected. The projects are usually expensive and usually not necessary.
In most countries that have a democratically elected government, it is made up of members that are chosen to represent a small part of the country. These constituencies hold elections to elect the representative they want to represent them, and the party that has the most of these representatives ends up running the countries. The US system is a little more confusing, but they still have senators that are elected from certain areas. From the earliest days of politics, people have tried to get elected by offering to do something for their supporters. This usually involves bringing in money and jobs. This is not illegal and has long been seen as the way to do politics. It is common sense that the representative of one area will try to bring rewards home to their area. However, this practice is known as pork barrel politics.
There are many examples of this, but here are two. The first example is Boston’s Big Dig. Tip O’Neill was a senator from Massachusetts, representing northern Boston. He was also the 47th speaker of the United States House of Representatives. In 1982, he put forward a project to have 5.6 km of highway put underground and he wanted the government to pay for it. He used all of his considerable influence and the project was greenlighted, taking from 1991 to 2007. It went far over budget and ended up costing $14.6 billion. It helped fix congestion on the streets of Boston, but it brought a lot of projects. Still, it did secure Tip O’Neill reelection and one of the tunnels was named after him.
The second example is the Bridge to Nowhere and this is an example of when the policy didn’t work. Two senators from Alaska tried to secure $398 million to build a bridge from Ketchikan International Airport on Gravina Island in Alaska to the mainland. There is a ferry service that ships about 550 people a day across the divide. The proposal took flight, but was shot down by a huge opposition to the growing number of pork barrel projects that were eating up taxpayer money. It was finally cancelled. However, it wasn’t cancelled before a $25 million highway to nowhere was built.
These kinds of projects happen in every country that has elected representatives. I live in Japan and we have no shortage of bridges to nowhere and giant concert halls in the middle of the forest. So, why are they called pork barrel projects? The term “pork barrel” started off to mean a state’s financial resources, but, before that, it literally meant a barrel of pork. Before refrigeration, the only way to keep meat edible for long periods of time was to salt it. Salted pork would be kept in a barrel and it could be taken on ships for long voyages or kept in a house. From that came the expression “dipping into the pork barrel”, which meant taking a large share of money, but originally meant taking a larger share or stealing pork. A lot of houses kept their food in this way and James Fenimore Cooper said you could tell the financial state of a family when they could “see the bottom of the pork barrel”. We also get the expression “scraping the bottom of the barrel” from this. When the food was almost gone, people would scrape the bottom to get whatever they could.
From 1801, “pork barrel” started to mean the state’s financial resources in the United States. It didn’t have any negative connotations and just meant the money that the state used. By the second half of the century, shortly after the American Civil War, pork barrel had taken on a negative meaning and was used to refer to the money that politicians used on their constituents to garner their support and votes.
Pork barrel projects are a huge source of waste in any country. The people who are advocating for the projects to be completed are not objective and cannot judge if the project is necessary. An American think tank called Citizens Against Government Waste has analyzed all of the pork barrel projects since 1991 in the United States. They have calculated that there were 111,702 projects that have used up $392.5 billion. That is a ludicrously large amount of money and that is only in the United States. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://www.polyas.com/election-glossary/pork-barrel-politics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=pork+barrel