A senator is vocally contesting the inclusion of a project in his home state in the 2014 ”Congressional Pig Book.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, issued a statement over the weekend touting his effort to preserve (and in fact increase) funding for the East-West Center, a cultural and education exchange center established by Congress in 1960 that’s based in Honolulu.
“For years, the State Department tried to eliminate the center by not requesting funding in the department’s annual budget requests,” the group Citizens Against Government Waste said in the “Pig Book.”
Of course, attempting to zero out funding for a center in the home state of a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee was never likely to succeed. That was true for years under the watchful eye of the late Democratic Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, and the center has continued past his death.
Schatz has defended its funding since then, and in a Saturday statement, he particularly seized on the presence of Texas Republican Ted Cruz at the Citizens Against Government Waste 2014 unveil event, along with live pigs and a costumed pig character.
Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post titled "East-West Center Collapsing?"
The East-West Center (EWC) was established in 1960 by the US Congress. Here is a biography of EWC President Charles Morrison. Here is a list of EWC's Board of Governors. Here is its annual report from 2012 and one from 2013.
The think tank has a 21-acre campus in Honolulu, Hawaii as well as an office in Washington, DC.
EWC was recently rated as the 12th best government-affiliated think tank by the University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings.