The Public Interest

The new pork barrel

Pietro S. Nivola

Spring 1998

A LITTLE more than 20 years have passed since David Stockman’s famous essay, “The Social Pork Barrel,” appeared in The Public Interest. For most of those years, Stockman’s description of how the federal government spent our money remained true: Congress kept adding “a billion here” and “a billion there” for every imaginable do-good project the legislators could pack into their districts. 

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