Washington, D.C. – The following is a prepared statement by Keith Ashdown, Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense on the passage of TEA-LU:

To the shock of absolutely no one, the transportation bill was passed today by a margin of 357-65. In lieu of filling the bill with projects that will truly meet our nation’s growing congestion crisis, leadership instead decided to spend more than $10.6 billion on 3,248 earmarks in almost every congressional district in the nation. The formula was simple: $14 million for every district and if you’re on the committee or have a close election that amount would skyrocket. There is more grease in this bill than a NASCAR car pit and this is for good reason: the transportation bill’s passage just goes to show that if you include enough local interest payoffs, you can get anything passed. Despite efforts of the bill writers to immunize this bill with special interest pork, the President needs to make the transportation bill his first sacrificial lamb.

Compounding the problem of rampant earmarking, Rep. Young (R-AK) chose to add many of the largest, most egregious earmarks in a last-minute manager’s amendment that added more than $1 billion to the bill. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this sort of behavior from a member of some of the nation’s greatest purveyors of pork: Alaskan lawmakers. They dub themselves “The Last Frontier” state, and they are certainly on the frontier of pork, always marching boldly towards greater heights of fiscal lunacy.

From covered bridges, horse trails, museums, water taxis, almost everything and anything gets a piece of the action in this bill. In short, there are special interest projects for every Congressional district in the nation, except for South Dakota. Lawmakers have been blinded by their greed to bring home the bacon in an election year and have forgotten that our nation has a fiscal crisis.