Individual earmarks may have swum upstream for the winter, but there’s still something very fishy going on with Congress in terms of spending. Despite all the discussion about austerity and countless campaign promises to cut spending, the crafters of the Continuing Resolution let stand a rulemaking policy no one can be proud of: a special interest-driven program that will create over 100 new government employees, more red tape, and hundreds of millions of new federal spending, without any benefit to taxpayers…all for – you guessed it – a fish.

You may have thought that Ted Stevens’ giant salmon of a private plane was the most spectacular fish-related waste of taxpayer dollars in history, but you’d be wrong. It turns out that the government’s handling of real fish -specifically, catfish – dwarfs that million-dollar monstrosity.

A special interest provision tacked onto the 2008 Farm Bill mandated that the USDA inspect all imported catfish.  Proponents, who unsurprisingly included those with a stake in the American catfish industry, cited safety concerns as the reason behind the program, patriotically claiming that protecting Americans from bad foreign catfish was as important, if notmore important than protecting them from foreign terror groups.

Unfortunately, their argument for a sort of “catfish TSA” doesn’t hold water. As it turns out, all catfish are already inspected by the FDA, so this second inspection would be superfluous at best and at worst, a complete waste of taxpayer funds. Second, catfish are actually low on the threat-level scale, labeled a “low-risk” food by both the CDC and – get this – the USDA itself.

You read that right.

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Last month, Phil Kerpen wrote an insightful piece here at BigGovernment.com about “The Stimulus Bill’s Hidden Attack on What We Eat, Drink, and Smoke.” In it, he detailed yet another absurd (and angering) use of so-called “stimulus” funds to help lobby for restrictions and higher taxes on the nanny state’s favorite targets: unhealthy foods, sweetened beverages, tobacco, and other disfavored products that your friendly bureaucrat doesn’t think you ought to enjoy. Digging through the Health and Human Services Department’s stimulus website raises some serious questions about the $650 million in taxpayer money being spent on this program, called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Several grant descriptions suggest that this funding may be in violation of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, through which the CPPW program is administered. The CDC’s lobbying restriction guideline states in part that, “no part of CDC appropriated funds, shall be used…to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress or any State or local legislature.” And yet, that’s exactly what several of the grantees plan to use the money for.

For example, Jefferson County, Alabama plans to spend $7 million on a “tobacco use prevention and cessation initiative [that] will promote changes in policies to reduce smoking opportunities and reduce access to tobacco products.” Pretty straightforward, that. They plan to lobby for more smoking bans and restricting access to legal tobacco products.

New York City, for its part, plans to spend $15.5 million “work[ing] to set policies and create environments that reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and overly salted foods.” One New York legislator is already trying to “create an environment” where restaurants are prohibited by law from using SALT in their food. Yes, salt, the substance without which virtually every food on Earth would be inedible.

Perhaps my favorite, our nation’s capital is spending $4.9 million on a program called “LiveWell DC,” which will “explore limiting tobacco access through zoning/license restrictions, restrict point-of-purchase advertising of tobacco products, support the elimination of price discounts, and provide social support through quitline and other cessation services.” Quite the laundry list there.

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One of the more extreme proposals floated early in the national health care debate was the idea of taxing soda and other sugary beverages. That trial balloon was almost immediately shot down by the American public, but the Obama administration is attempting to achieve, by subterfuge, soda taxes and a lot of other ways to micromanage our lives in the name of public health—whether or not ObamaCare passes. The mechanism is buried in last year’s $862-billion-and-counting stimulus bill, and works by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that should be promoting economic growth to instead pay lobbyists to push for higher taxes and nanny-state controls over our lives.

It’s on pages 66 and 67 on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which created a $1 billion “Prevention and Wellness Fund.” Of that, $650 million went to Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services and has been used to start a new program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Where does that giant pot of grant funding under the CPPW go? What it calls “MAPPS Interventions for Communities Putting Prevention to Work.” MAPPS stands for “Media, Access, Point of decision information, Price, and Social support/services.” In other words, strategies for changing our behavior, for social engineering on a large-scale, and, it seems, circumventing the normal democratic process. In a 14-page guidance for grant applicants, the CDC details tactics that grant applicants should include in their plans. It includes “counter-advertising” against targeted products, complete tobacco usage bans, limiting “unhealthy food availability” (the really bad stuff like “whole milk, sugar sweetened beverages, high-fat snacks”), and of course taxes (or in CDC lingo: “changing relative prices of healthy vs. unhealthy items”).

A supplemental document explains in more detail what the targets are, including restricting availability of soft drinks “in homes, schools, work sites, and communities.”

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