All government programs are sacred cows.
Once taxpayers fund anything, a vocal constituency develops to assert that the nation could not survive another day without the program. This is one reason why the 1990 deficit-reduction package did not cut one program or one bureaucrat or even one penny from total federal spending. Perhaps the most absurd example of this self-perpetuating nonsense is the U.S. farm program. Relatively poor American taxpayers pay relatively rich American farmers billions of dollars each year not to grow food. But for more than fifty years, misguided governmental policy has created strong incentives for regulated rice, wheat peanut, and tobacco farmers to reduce output and raise prices.