But I have studied enough budgets, both Federal and State, to know that huge chunks are worthless pork and raw waste. Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of all politicians is to fight cuts by immediately directing those cuts to the most critical and popular areas and ignoring the crap. This way, if it works, he gets to keep both the essentials and the crap.

This works even at the local level. How many times has pressure on a city budget resulted in the council loudly proclaiming cuts in the police, school, and library budgets unless they are allowed to raise taxes?

Nobody ever cuts the million-dollar programs to replant the road medians with hand-selected native California plants, build a new concrete skateboard park, or change the color of all the streetlights to make astronomers happy.

Almost all budgets are available in detail on the Internet. The Federal one is so byzantine you can burn out your brain on it, but state and local ones show this phenomenon quite clearly.