During the Thanksgiving holiday, some were lucky enough to dine on “turducken.” If you haven’t heard about this recently conceived delicacy, turducken is the ultimate in holiday gluttony-a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey, then roasted to a golden brown. Sounds like an appropriate description for last week’s hastily-passed $388 billion omnibus spending bill. A turkey of a bill, a lame duck session, and a Congress too chicken to provide its members or the public enough time to actually read the bill for fear of what lurks inside. Voila. Congress has cooked up the Turducken Omnibus Bill of 2004.

As TCS uncovered in the few hours between the bill’s release and the final vote, this bird is stuffed with nearly 12,000 earmarks. What’s the problem with all this stuffing? One earmark nestled in the transportation bill, a $1.5 million project for “Louis Reef Road and Boswick Lake Road, Alaska,” is the perfect example of how a seemingly innocuous product of the earmarking process is in fact a prime cut of parochial pork. Both roads provide access to a timber sale that no longer exists. They are, quite literally, roads to nowhere.

Louis Reef and Boswick Lake Roads were originally slated to be built with private money for the purpose of accessing a private timber mill. Specifically, these roads would make it easier to transport logs from the proposed Gravina Island timber sale in the Tongass National Forest to the private mill.

In response to local controversy about the roads, the Forest Service announced on November 18, 2004 that it was reversing its original decision to allow the Gravina Island timber sale and would reconsider the project. This decision effectively makes the Louis Reef and Boswick Lake Roads completely pointless, yet the earmark still exists, and so the money will still be spent.

Native leaders from Saxman, Metlakatla and Ketchikan, the Organized Village of Saxman, and the Annette Islands Reserve Council in Metlakatla all opposed the Gravina Island timber sale. In addition, the Gravina sale would have been the very first timber sale in a roadless area since President Clinton established a rule barring logging and road building in the nation’s 58.5 million roadless acres, a rule that the current administration has reversed in Alaska.

A road project funded with taxpayer dollars, built for private benefit, opposed by the local community, and that has had its justification eliminated, will nonetheless receive $1.5 million. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with earmarks.

The earmarking process allows members of Congress to impose their individual will on communities who know better what they want and what they need. Instead of allowing federal agencies to do the jobs they’re trained for, Congress is engaged in irresponsible micromanagement, guided by corporate lobbyists who wield an enormous amount of power over federal spending.

All the while, the earmarking epidemic is spreading. With nearly 12,000 earmarks, the problems illustrated by the Gravina roads earmark are likely repeated thousands of times in this bill alone. The number of earmarks increases each year, sending ever larger portions of our budget to dubious local projects. Unless a sufficient number of legislators are willing to vote for good policy over good pork, the problem is likely to get worse.