Welcome to Byrd country

It isn't on most maps and has no residents, but Rocket Center has a famous friend on Capitol Hill.

His identity? Here's a hint: After you clear the guards and the chain-link perimeter that rings the complex, turn right at the Robert C. Byrd Metals Fabrication Center. Continue up the hill – stopping for forklifts carrying explosives – to the gleaming Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex, including the Robert C. Byrd Institute and the Erma Ora Byrd Conference and Learning Center.

Since 1985, Senator Byrd (D) of West Virginia has directed $250 million in earmarks to upgrade the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) here in his state's eastern panhandle – $26 million this year alone.

For the Senate's "king of pork," it's a drop in the bucket. After 47 years on the Senate's powerful Appropriations Committee, Byrd has mastered congressional earmarks – add-ons to spending bills for projects back home. Since 1991, he has steered $3 billion in earmarks to West Virginia, according to Citizens Against Government Waste.

Sums that vast show Byrd's effort to boost the Mountain State's economy. But they also obscure the sometimes tense synergy between Congress and the Pentagon over the merits of military earmarks.

Money for ABL is one of 2,847 congressional earmarks in the FY 2006 Defense Appropriations bill. It includes $1.6 million for Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Activities, $850,000 for a memorial park in Des Moines, Iowa, and $1.7 million to do something about brown snakes in Guam. In all, member projects added up to $9.4 billion in this year's defense spending bill, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Critics, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, say that such "member adds" force cuts in more important priorities. They are "simply things that we need to spend on that we don't want," Mr. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee Aug. 3. "The combination of all of that is big dollars, and it hurts."

But not all pork is equal – and not all earmarks are bad, say analysts close to the process. The key questions with any defense earmark are whether the Pentagon really wants it and, if so, why it isn't included in the Pentagon budget. Also: What doesn't get done in order to pay for it?

"What I've learned from doing this for eight years is that every earmark, for good or bad, has a story, and before you comment on it you should know that story," says Keith Ashdown, vice president for policy and communications at Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington, which has produced the most comprehensive analysis of defense earmarks.

In fact, defense earmarks are among the toughest in any federal spending cycle to track down. It took analysts more than six months to even identify earmarks in this year's defense spending bill, because most are not identified by location or the name of the congressional sponsor.

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