Possibly none, until we can figure out how to engineer political institutions that function without pork.

We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.

Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.

I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way

The reality is that "anything" can be pork - if you have large amounts of money sloshing around, someone benefits from getting it, and you can use that benefit for negotiations.

The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.