If there’s any remark Trent Lott wishes he could have back (other than the one he made at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party), it’s the one emblazoned atop the website Porkbusters.org: “I’ll just say this about the Porkbusters,” the quote reads. “I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina.”

With those words, Lott gave an air of legitimacy to a loosely affiliated group of online activists and bloggers — the Porkbusters — who have made the elimination of wasteful federal spending one of their top political priorities. “[Porkbusters] is not really an organization at all in any classical sense — no org chart, no budget,” co-founder Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit tells National Review Online. “It needed something to convince people that this was real, and nothing did a better job of that than Trent Lott bitching about it.”

It came as no surprise to those who follow pork-barrel politics that Lott was one of seven Republicans who joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week in an attempt to water down a set of tough new rules requiring lawmakers to disclose all the earmarks they insert into bills and bill reports. Reid’s efforts to keep earmarking a secretive, anonymous process were stymied, however, when nine Democrats broke from his ranks and joined South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint in urging the Senate to be at least as bold as Nancy Pelosi, whose House had already passed the stringent new disclosure requirements.

Within hours of their failed attempt to kill DeMint’s amendment, Reid and Durbin were shellacked by the Club for Growth Blog, Instapundit, and TPMMuckraker. These blog posts were followed by articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, all of which put Reid and Durbin on the wrong side of good public-policy reform. Looking down the barrel of a p.r. nightmare, they negotiated a few face-saving changes to the DeMint amendment and declared victory. Shortly afterward, the Club for Growth blog announced, "Reid waves white flag." (The amendment is expected to pass the Senate today.)

This chain of events follows a familiar path: Somebody alerts the blogosphere to a bit of pork-related news (often this is a government-watchdog group like Club for Growth or Citizens Against Government Waste). Maybe Reynolds or pseudonymous co-founder N.Z. Bear sends out an e-mail to the Porkbusters interest list; maybe not. In any case, bloggers who get angry about wasteful spending start pushing the story, prompting constituents to contact their representatives and attracting the attention of the mainstream media. The constituent response and media attention often give enough cover to anti-pork members of Congress that they are able to shame the porkers into voting the right way on important reform bills. For example, as a Senate GOP staffer put it to NRO Friday, “Yesterday [Reid and Durbin] were so bold as to defy usual Senate customs and hold the vote open, and today, lo and behold they’re singing a completely different tune. What’s the difference? There’s been an enormous outcry in the blogosphere and the media.”

By following this blueprint, the Porkbusters movement appears to have supplied a missing ingredient that’s made a big difference in recent budget-reform battles. Reynolds calls it outside-the-Beltway outrage, and says it helped jumpstart a debate that often seemed too uncool to garner much attention from the Beltway media. “It gave them an excuse to talk about it,” he tells NRO: The “Uproar in the blogosphere” angle.

“[Porkbusters] started originally as a suggestion from one of my blog readers,” Reynolds says. “The idea was to have people contact their members and ask them what pork projects they would give up to help fund Katrina relief, and that’s what we did.” Members started hearing about Porkbusters, much to the evident consternation of Trent Lott. “We started seeing a lot of house.gov and senate.gov hits on the site,” Reynolds explains.

With a background in information technology and a shared antipathy toward wasteful spending, co-founder N.Z. Bear worked with Reynolds to make Porkbusters.org a rallying point for like-minded anti-porkers. “Glenn has a very unique position of being able to bring a lot of eyeballs to a story, and I can keep track and draw attention with the occasional silly publicity stunt like the secret hold,” “Bear” says, referring to the Porkbusters effort to smoke out the Senator who placed an anonymous hold on the creation of an online federal spending database. (It turned out to be Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens. Surprise!)

When asked about the future of Porkbusters, both Reynolds and N.Z. Bear say that the group is more of an ad hoc response team than an organization with a plan of action. “We can act as a catalyst,” “Bear” says, “and my ambitions and to-do list mostly revolve around trying to build out the tools and the infrastructure of the Porkbusters site so we can form a community around it and put tools in the hands of people who want to be involved.”

Reynolds adds: “We don’t operate like a lobby group where we have a lot of strategy meetings, so to that extent we’re dependent on the outside groups [like CAGW on the right or the more left-leaning Sunlight Foundation]. There’s been a pretty good synergy among those watchdog groups, news organs and Porkbusters,” he says, “but fundamentally, it’s a web site, a logo and a way of looking at the world.”

Perhaps the biggest success of the Porkbusters movement has been its ability to incorporate the efforts of both left- and right-leaning bloggers, transcending the partisan bickering which characterizes so much of the political blogosphere. “The real split on this stuff is not conservatives vs. liberals or Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s insiders vs. outsiders,” Reynolds says.

And it’s not just the Porkbusters who are bipartisan. Just ask Trent Lott and Harry Reid. As they’re likely to attest, you can find the Porkbusted on both sides of the aisle.

— Stephen Spruiell is National Review Online’s media blogger.