Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) our February 2023 Porker of the Month for securing $666 billion in pork-barrel earmarks.
Now that earmarks are back, Sen. Shelby fed himself at the trough for 18 earmarks worth $666,406,000, which is 23 percent more than the next highest member of Congress. Sen. Shelby has always added earmarks at a prolific rate. When information on earmarks was available in 2008-2010, he added 424 earmarks costing $905 million. Sen. Shelby has a long history of acquiring wasteful pork-barrel earmarks and has been named CAGW’s Porker of the Month six times including today. As a long-time member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, including ranking member before he retired in 2022, Sen. Shelby poured hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks into the University of Alabama, where multiple buildings on multiple campuses have been named after him and his wife Annette.
The constitutionally mandated annual State of the Union address (SOTU) provides an opportunity for the president to tout his achievements and make his case to the American people for more support of his agenda. It also provides the chance for critics of the president to note the issues that he either mentions in passing or completely fails to discuss.
In his Feb. 7, 2023, SOTU, President Biden failed to describe how he planned to cut wasteful spending, just like his two prior addresses. And he made only a passing reference to the need to raise the debt ceiling by June 5, 2023, despite his involvement in the same process in 2011, when he agreed to $2 trillion in spending cuts and an increase in the debt ceiling as part of the Budget Control Act, which set spending caps for the next 10 years.
Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest taxpayer watchdog group with more than one million members and supporters nationwide. It is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government. Contributions to CAGW are tax-deductible as charitable contributions to the extent permitted by law. For more information about CAGW, visit our website at www.cagw.org. To help CAGW battle the runaway deficit spending that is bankrupting America, make a tax-deductible contribution to CAGW today.