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by skewart
2293 days ago
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Great write up. Can you say more about how the congressional district pork funnel works? I mean, how brazen is it? What are some examples of the kind of projects that serve little technical purpose and exist only to funnel money to a district? |
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Thanks.
> Can you say more about how the congressional district pork funnel works? I mean, how brazen is it?
That depends on what you mean by "brazen". In my tenure no one ever explicitly said, "We need to do X because we need to send money to congressional district Y." It was more like: "Your proposal will stand a much better chance if it's a joint proposal with institution Z." When I asked why, there was never any technical rationale for it. It was more like, "Look, I'm just trying to help you out here. Don't ask too many questions."
To be fair, sometimes those coerced collaborations were productive. But other times they caused some very serious problems in the case where there was really nothing useful coming out of Z. In that case we had to find a way to shoehorn something coming out of Z into the project, and that usually did not end well.