At over 800 pages and costing $2 trillion, Congress' new stimulus package is filled with seemingly unrelated spending and special favors. The final product is a compromise between the original senate Republican proposal, which was under 300 pages, and the plan crafted by House Democrats, which was closer to 1,400 pages. Besides the major functions of the stimulus, these are the special cutouts that were included as well.

Many of the extraneous positions were added between Sunday and Wednesday when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats would not support the Republican-crafted bill unless serious changes were made. The changes included substantial pork.

Casinos lobbied to make sure they would not be excluded from participating in either the small business loan program or the big business bailout measures. The Las Vegas Strip has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and MGM Resorts International and Wynn Resorts were not about to allow themselves to be excluded. Casinos were previously not permitted to receive tax breaks in aid bills passed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Individuals with student loans will be able to take a six-month hiatus on their payments, with no interest accruing in the meantime. But the bill also provides a tax benefit for employers who help pay for their employee’s loans. On an annual basis, a company could contribute $5,250 to the loan tax-free. A measure supported by large companies and college organizations, it was a pet project of Republican John Thune of South Dakota and Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia.

It’s hard to find any large spending bill in Washington D.C. that doesn’t include cut-outs for farmers and the agricultural industry, an influential group that goes back to the founding of the country. This stimulus includes $9.5 billion in emergency aid for big agricultural firms and replenishes the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation with $14 billion. The key enablers in this instance were Republican John Hoeven of North Dakota and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

“This bill should have been voted on much sooner in both the Senate and House and it shouldn’t be stuffed full of Nancy Pelosi’s pork—including $25 million for the Kennedy Center, grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, and millions more other measures that have no direct relation to the Coronavirus Pandemic. That $25 million, for example, should go directly to purchasing test kits,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Massie was the lone member of congress who promised to try to prevent the bill from passing with a voice vote. To counteract this attempt at congressional transparency, enough members gathered for a quorum that the voice vote was successful. There will be no provable record of which members of Congress voted for the legislation, including the corporate bailouts.

Hunter DeRensis is the senior reporter for the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter @HunterDeRensis.