The omnibus bill, passed by the House and awaiting a Senate vote, contains a jaw-dropping $373 billion worth of goodies.

Any lawmaker who says he’s read the entire foot-high bill is either lying or delusional. But a flip through its pages reveals a spending shindig likely to set a new record for pork-barrel waste of tax dollars.

Lowlights include $50 million to build an indoor tropical rainforest in Iowa. This tidbit started life in the corporate-welfare energy bill as an example of how to use energy in the environment.

But when that bill appeared dead on arrival, the rainforest, to be located in Coralville, magically morphed into an economic development project, a way to teach children the “wonders of the jungle.”

By my calculations, for 50 million greenbacks, we’d come out ahead by buying each of Coralville’s 17,000 citizens three round-trip plane tickets to Brazil to see a real rainforest. Then taxpayers could avoid having to cough up the rest of the dough for a dubious project expected to eventually cost $225 million.

Then there’s the swimming pool in Sparks, Nev. Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons asked his colleagues for $225,000 to repair a pool that he and his friends clogged with tadpoles in the 1950s. Seems the drains haven’t worked properly since.

“I have an enormous guilty conscience for putting frogs in the swimming pool when I was about 10 years old,” Gibbons has said. And obviously no guilt whatsoever about asking us to pay for it.

It’s no coincidence that Alaska, home of Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, makes out like a bandit, including $447,000 for “halibut data collection,” and $200,000 for the city of North Pole for “recreational improvements.”

What improvements? Hop on your sled and have fun.

Then there’s $2 million for kiddie golf in St. Augustine, Fla., and $1.8 million for the Appalachian fruit laboratory in West Virginia. I could continue, but you get the point. Budget dust adds up.

The spending bill, called an omnibus, is stuffed with an estimated 7,000 special interest provisions, from $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa to $150,000 for a stop light and traffic improvements in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. If the Senate approves it, total spending on pet projects — which has more than doubled in the last five years — will reach roughly $23 billion this year, the most ever, according to watchdog groups that track federal spending.

Pork barrel projects are a time-honored tradition in Washington. But observers of the Congressional efforts are surprised, and in some cases dismayed, by the size of the special-interest projects this year, at a time when the federal deficit is rising and Republicans, who fashion themselves as fiscally conservative, run both houses of Congress.

The spending bill, which the Senate will take up in January, treats the home states of powerful appropriators especially well. Alaska, home to Senator Ted Stevens, the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would reap millions under the measure, including $1 million for the Anchorage Museum and $1 million for the Tongass Coast Aquarium. Florida, the home state of Representative C. W. Bill Young, a Republican who is Mr. Stevens's counterpart in the House, also stands to gain millions.

Every state — indeed nearly every Congressional district, no matter Democratic or Republican — is the recipient of one pork project or another. The measure includes $200,000 for the University of Hawaii to produce a documentary on the Kalahari Bushmen, $220,000 to renovate a blueberry research center at the University of Maine and, in a provision Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, called "most ironic," $500,000 for the "Exercise in Hard Choices" program at the University of Akron, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions.

"It's worse than ever, and it's even more egregious because the Republicans are in charge, and everyone thought that they would be fiscally responsible," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, an advocacy group that named Mr. Gibbons "Porker of the Month" for the pool provision. "That's the big disappointment."