Porker of the Month

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has named Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) Porker of the Month for his legacy as the “King of Pork,” as he became the longest-serving Senator in U.S. history this month. Sen. Byrd has sat on the Appropriations Committee since 1959, his first year in the Senate. Since 1991, West Virginia has received $2.95 billion in pork, $1.2 billion allocated in the Senate. The state has ranked among the top four in CAGW's pork per capita every year since 2001 and became the first state to reap $1 billion in parochial projects in 1999, earning Sen. Byrd the CAGW-bestowed moniker, “King of Pork.” Despite the senator’s beneficence, justified on the premise of his state’s poor economy, decades of raiding the federal Treasury have failed to improve the lot of West Virginians, who now suffer from the third-lowest personal income per capita in the country. For his legacy of narcissism and waste, CAGW names the “King of Pork,” Sen. Robert Byrd, Porker of the Month for June 2006.

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