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Redirect highway pork to fund hurricane relief

It would be disgraceful to move forward with the pet projects in this year's $286.4-billion highway bill while Gulf Coast communities sit in devastation.

The first place President Bush and Congress should look to fund hurricane relief is this year's pork-laden highway bill. Even if the federal government were not scrounging to respond to a national emergency, the $286.4-billion, six-year spending plan is a shameful waste of money. Instead of building highways and bridges to nowhere, the government should redirect some of this money to rebuilding the Gulf Coast's transportation infrastructure.

No one knows what the recovery will cost. Congress and the president approved $51.8-billion in additional spending this week, bringing the initial federal outlay to $62-billion. But with 145,000 people in shelters, and many more staying with friends or in temporary housing, the costs could easily reach $150-billion or more.

The point is that America needs to spend what it takes to piece these lives back together, and with the costs unknown, now is the time to set clear national priorities. Spending $6-million for a Vermont snowmobile trail is not among them. Neither is building a $231-million bridge in southeast Alaska. The highway bill includes 6,370 special projects - pork lawmakers from both parties love to bring home. The deficit already looked bad before Katrina, and now the outlook is worse.

The cost goes beyond financing emergency relief, which is costing $700-million a day, or even rebuilding destroyed neighborhoods. Hurricane Katrina will cut 400,000 people from the job rolls and slow economic growth in the coming months, according to an assessment this week by the Congressional Budget Office. That comes on the heels of spiking gas costs, which could increase at least temporarily the prices for goods across the board and dampen consumer spending.

This is not the time to blow millions of dollars on highway landscaping, motor industry museums, bike trails and roads that only satisfy politicians' appetite for federal pork. Opening this honey pot would not rebuild the Gulf Coast, but it would show the people in Washington have something of a clue as to where their responsibility lies.

[Last modified September 10, 2005, 01:22:18]