Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Where the public money runs deepest the hogs fight each other to get their snouts in the trough, and the big trough nowadays runs through the Pentagon.

The host of contractors, speculators, stockjobbers, and lobby members which haunt the halls of Congress, all desirous ... to get their arm into the public treasury, are sufficient to alarm every friend of this country. Their progress must be arrested.

Congressmen have their noses right in the trough and they're slurping it up for their districts at the expense of all the taxpayers.

We all have to pay when powerful members of Congress work to bring home the bacon.

Pork is the most visible malady of Congress from the public point of view.

The President is going around the country handing out so much pork that the Agriculture Department is going to have to station a meat inspector on board Air Force One.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

The Pig Book

The ideal weapons system is built in 435 congressional districts, and it doesn't matter whether it works or not.

The root of most all problems we have today is the uncontrollable appetite of politicians in Washington to dish it out.

The military pork barrel spreads special privilege far beyond the confines of the arms contractors; it directly creates at least two million industrial jobs, every holder of which is all too dependent for his well-being on the well-being of the party oligarchs and the success of their corrupt policies. By virtue of the military budget, a large number of ordinary citizens have been given a direct stake in corrupt power.

Earmarks are the gateway to corruption.

I'm sick and tired - and the American people are sick and tired - of the pork barrel spending.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible.

We see people voting for bills that their ideals and principles are opposed to, but because their little funding project is in there, they're voting for it. We might say it's one percent of all spending but the impact of that spending is far greater.

The earmark favor factory needs to be boarded up and demolished, not turned over to new management that may or may not have a better eye for earmarks with 'merit.'

There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage ... No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents

George W. Bush is a big spender…. When Congress sends up a bill with big. fat, crackling pork, he says, “Where’s the barbecue sauce?”

Patronage cements parties. Those caviling against corruption are principally moralistic muckrakers who were never closely allied to the entrepreneurial spirit

Sooner or later you have to reach down into that old pork barrel.

There's more pork barrel than strategic need to the Galaxy.

Clinton talks reform, but it's business as usual in Washington with different pigs at the trough.

I cannot consent to act the part of a mere financier, to become a contriver of taxes, a dealer of loans, a seeker of resources for the purposes of supporting useless baubles, of increasing the number of idle and dissipated members of the community, of fattening contractors, pursers, and agents, and of introducing … patronage, corruption, and rottenness which you so justly execrate.

We are afraid that the Forestry Ministry will become another cash cow – for politicians