Some advocates for the poor worried that the money might be misused for pork barrel programs dear to lawmakers.
He used his clout as a member of the Senate majority party to provide goodies to his district, in the forms of pork barrel programs and personal political favors.
"There's something a little obscene about using this attack on America to get your favorite pork-barrel program through," he said.
He said "the political pressures" in Congress had turned the allocation of security money into a pork-barrel program in which small states received far more dollars per person than those states at greater risk, like New York.
After the vote, Mr. Bloomberg accused Congress of making domestic security a pork-barrel program by giving money to rural areas at the expense of New York, which he said is more at risk as a terror target.
In his view, a broad-based technology push would turn into a pork-barrel program and be far less efficient than the technology that would develop in response to a requirement to reduce emissions.
Mr. Bartlett criticized the House's stimulus bill for being heavy with pork-barrel programs, influenced more by politics than economics.
In budgetary matters, Bush spent more domestically than any president since Lyndon Johnson, and Obama continued the spending binge with his giant pork-barrel stimulus program to attempt to trick the country out of its Bush-induced Great Recession.
