Mad tea party

Budget: From a teapot museum to the World Toilet Summit, a new report shows that pork-barrel politics is worse than ever | Jamie Dean

The rural region of Yixing, China, is considered the birthplace of the teapot, according to teapot expert Richard Notkin. Nearly 1,000 years later, the rural region of Sparta, N.C., is set to become the birthplace of a multimillion-dollar, federally funded teapot museum. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a nonpartisan government watchdog group, reported this month that the yet-to-be-opened Sparta Teapot Museum will receive a half million dollars in federal funding for a $10 million building that will house a 7,000-piece teapot collection.

CAGW listed the museum's funding in its annual "Pig Book," a compilation of federal funding projects that the group classifies as "pork" or "earmark" spending. Earmark projects are typically tacked onto large appropriation bills and usually pass with no debate or budget review. The projects are often added onto bills in conference sessions after legislation has already passed, giving congressmen an easy way to get federal bucks for projects back home. CAGW identified $29 billion in pork-barrel spending for the fiscal year 2006.