Portman the Porkbuster!!!

Arguably the preeminent porkie politician in Congress, even Sen. Robert Byrd is supposedly on board to eliminate earmarks. Or maybe he's finally gotten bored of naming the entire state of West Virginia after himself. Whatever the reason, we'll take it. WSJ:

On Thursday, White House budget director Rob Portman issued little-noticed guidance to all federal departments and agencies that no Congressional requests for spending should be accommodated unless they are "specifically identified in statutory text" -- which is to say, the law.

This may sound like it ought to be regular practice, but it's a revolution in the Beltway. That's because, in order to dodge the legislative earmark limits that Mr. Byrd has been bragging about, Members have been speed-dialing executive branch officials and asking them to fund their specific earmark requests out of agency budgets even though they were purged from the larger budget bill. This Congressional lobbying can be hard for the average federal bureaucrat to refuse, since he doesn't want to offend those on Capitol Hill who control his budget. Mr. Portman's directive is intended to stiffen these backbones against such Congressional extortion.

If the attempt succeeds in reducing earmarks, this means the Fiscal 2007 federal budget could have the fewest number of these pork-barrel projects in many a year.

Kudos to Rob Portman, who used to be a congressman himself, and hopefully has shut down the big-talkin' big spenders.