pork-barrel

That's one of the reasons I think presidents need a line-item veto authority. I had it when I was governor of California, and governors in forty-two other states have it as well. When the state legislature sent me a budget, I could take a blue pencil and reduce spending on individual items to a level taxpayers could afford. If there was something laudable about a piece of legislation, I could sign it but veto features in it that were pure pork. The legislators had the opportunity to override my decision—but none of my 943 vetoes in Sacramento were overturned, because legislators didn't want to publicly defend, under the full scrutiny of voters, their pork-barrel projects or items they had husbanded through their committees because of the influence of campaign donors and special-interest groups.