Congress caught on quickly, and was soon writing “omnibus” authorization bills, in which bad projects were thrown in, willy-nilly, with good ones. (Later, Congress would learn a new trick: attaching sneaky little amendments authorizing particularly wretched projects to legislation dealing with issues such as education and hurricane relief.) As a result, instead of weeding out or discouraging bad projects, the “reforms” began to concentrate on making bad projects work—or, to put it more bluntly, on bailing them out.
