In fairness to the Democrats, their 1,400-page draft had nothing about windmills. But in fairness to Trump, windmills were among the few Democratic priorities that didn’t appear in the Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act that the House floated Monday night. The proposal did include extra funding for workers and families, but also for Supplemental Dairy Margin Coverage, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—even though the Kennedy Center is closed—and hundreds of other government programs and services unrelated to the emergency.

Congressional leaders didn’t use the House draft as the basis for the stimulus deal they struck early Wednesday morning, but they did fund quite a few of its provisions—from modest items with little connection to the pandemic, like $12.5 million for the Bureau of Reclamation or $25 million for the Kennedy Center, to $25 billion for ravaged transit agencies. And Congress is expected to pass more stimulus bills in the coming months, so the House proposal still bears a very close look as a preview of how Democrats plan to use their leverage. It also gives Republicans some talking points about the random taxpayer-funded goodies their opponents are pushing during a crisis.

What’s in it? Even though airports are virtually empty, and the Transportation Security Administration has never had less to do, the Democrats proposed $26 million for overtime for TSA employees. They also slipped in $20 million to help the TSA to buy new swabs for detecting explosives, a worthy security measure that lacks any apparent connection to the pandemic, $31 million for “bio-surveillance of wildlife,” and $45 million to help the Agricultural Marketing Service grade commodities like beef, eggs and, well, pork.

Agricultural anything tends to attract bipartisan support, and the final stimulus deal included that entire $45 million request. But suffice to say that if Christmas trees were graded, the House’s draft would be USDA Prime, while the final deal would probably be closer to U.S. Standard. And in an economic crisis, congressional grab bags can be politically toxic.

In 2009, Republicans successfully branded President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill as a dog’s breakfast of traditional big-government spending—including “sod on the Mall,” “smoking cessation,” “herpes prevention” and other line items that didn’t even make it into the final bill. Now some former Obama aides are afraid congressional Democrats might be walking into the same “Porkulus” trap. Obama’s $800 billion Recovery Act helped end the Great Recession, but Republicans hammered away at its laundry-list optics so relentlessly that within a year, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created jobs was smaller than the percentage who believed Elvis was alive. Like Winston Churchill’s apocryphal pudding, the Obama stimulus lacked a theme, and Democrats seem to be repeating their public relations mistakes.

“Have we learned nothing?” asked Jared Bernstein, who worked on the Recovery Act as chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama White House.

It’s not just that the House bill veers away from the pandemic or even the economy. The bill simply reads like a typical congressional appropriations bill, with plus-ups like $100 million for NASA construction and environmental compliance and the Legal Services Corporation, as well as $300 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The only real difference is boilerplate language justifying most of the plus-ups “to support activities to prevent, prepare for and respond to coronavirus,” from the $20 million for the Bureau of Reclamation to the $33 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.