LETTERS: PORK GETS ATTACHED TO DEFENSE SPENDING

To the editor:

Pork knows no partisan boundaries. With the screws tightening on federal funding, the recent game in Congress is to attach pork projects that couldn't be funded elsewhere to the defense budget. "The insertion of these items has become an incredible art form," says Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an article in the Washington Post. Some of these:

$5.4 million for Hawaii's Small Business Development Center, $3.5 million for Cook County, Ill., military-style boot camp for drug offenders, $10 million for a National Guard outreach program to help Los Angeles youth, $1.5 million to round up wild horses wandering into White Sands Missile Range and $11 million to the Army to purchase additional jet aircraft from a Kansas corporation (Sen. Robert Dole's state).

The Republican leadership on Capital Hill (a Freudian slip) has left many of these untouched. Sen. McCain says refusal to cut these programs suggests "business as usual."

It seems that these come about and are left standing through traditional vote-trading deals: You vote for my pork, and I'll vote for yours. Sen. McCain says, "It's like a disease. It's never static. It gets worse or you kill it."

GILBERT DEGENHARDT

Cape Girardeau