WASHINGTON – Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York, slammed the federal government for failing to prioritize national security in its spending allocations yesterday – the same day she and New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, won the “Porker of the Year” prize from a government watchdog group accusing the lawmakers of wasting taxpayer money.

Speaking before the 74th winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, Mrs. Clinton told a ballroom full of the country’s municipal leaders: “You at the local level confront both the constraints of tight budgets and the difficulty of dealing with the federal government that, by action and inaction, has neglected and worsened domestic preparedness in many parts of our country.”

“First responders will have been under-funded by $100 million dollars by 2008,” Mrs. Clinton said, adding that municipalities face increasing homeland security obligations, but without corresponding federal financial support. “We have a resource problem,” the senator said, “because we’re not delivering the necessary resources to hire, train, and equip the men and women on the front lines.” Mrs. Clinton is running for reelection this year in New York, and is considered a likely presidential contender for 2008.

“We have misplaced priorities in Washington,” Mrs. Clinton added. “Funds that states and cities rely on are slashed, and when you ask, ‘Well, where’s the money going?’ because we’re in a huge deficit position now, we know that the money is going to tax cuts. And no matter what one thinks of cutting taxes … it is hard to square with the challenges we face at this time of terrorist threat.” Mrs. Clinton criticized “pork-barrel decision-making” as a cause of strained resources.

The senator’s remarks about misplaced spending priorities came as a government-spending watchdog group, the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste, awarded Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer the “Porker of the Year” award after an online poll rated the New York Democrats as America’s most wasteful legislators. The award is given to politicians “who have shown a blatant disregard for the interests of taxpayers,” according to a press release announcing the prize.

The award, and Mrs. Clinton’s comments faulting pork as a cause of insufficient homeland security funding, also come a month after The New York Sun reported that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer had secured $123 million in Defense Department funds for New York projects for which the Defense Department had not requested funding, but that had benefited contributors to the New York senators’ election campaigns.

Two of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents in this year’s Senate race, John Spencer, a Republican former mayor of Yonkers, and Jonathan Tasini, an anti-war Democrat, immediately pounced on Mrs. Clinton’s speech yesterday as “hypocritical.”

Mr. Spencer lambasted Mrs. Clinton for “criticizing the pork-barrel issue that she is so much a part of,” calling the address “naked, unashamed pandering” and a part of a “pattern” of Mrs. Clinton’s being “disingenuous.”

Mr. Tasini said any lack of homeland security funding for cities was Mrs. Clinton’s fault. “Mrs. Clinton has been vociferously pro-war, in favor of a war that has cost us $250 billion and rising,” Mr. Tasini said. “We’re less safe for that reason, and one of those reasons is that there’s less homeland security money because it’s being wasted on the Iraq war. … It’s a phenomenal waste of resources, and the responsibility for that rests right on her doorstep.”

After the speech, while speaking to reporters, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly ignored and then was whisked by her entourage away from a Sun reporter seeking comment about the pork criticism. Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Philippe Reines, responded to a later inquiry in an e-mail: “The Defense budget and the Homeland Security budgets are two separate budgets. Defense budget funds our troops and all of our additional funding support or national security. The Homeland Security Appropriations bill doesn’t work that way.”

In addition to spending priorities, Mrs. Clinton was also faulted for “hypocrisy” on the matter of national security. During her speech, the senator praised the 9/11 Commission as a model for providing for homeland security. Among the commission’s criticisms of American security in the lead-up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was that excessive bureaucratic obstacles had prevented sufficient intelligence-gathering about terrorists operating inside America.

Mrs. Clinton yesterday criticized a National Security Agency surveillance program that uses wiretaps to monitor incoming international calls to or from individuals suspected to be Al Qaeda affiliates. Democrats have cited the program in recent weeks as an example of President Bush’s alleged disregard for Americans’ privacy and a purported overreaching of power. Yesterday Mrs. Clinton told reporters that she felt the administration’s explanation of the surveillance program’s legality was “far-fetched.”

For the senator to be praising the intelligence recommendations of the 9/11 Commission one minute, and then lambasting the president for having implemented improved surveillance after the attacks the next minute, was another example of Mrs. Clinton’s being “disingenuous,” Mr. Spencer said, and proof that the senator was unfit to be Commander in Chief.

Later in the day, Mrs. Clinton spoke before the Senate during debate on the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Announcing that she would not vote for the nominee, Mrs. Clinton criticized Judge Alito for having “not shown any dedication to Civil Rights or women’s rights,” for not understanding or respecting the principles of the Founding Fathers, and for being guided by a “radical ideology.”

In her floor speech, Mrs. Clinton cautioned that, if Mr. Alito were confirmed to the court, he would “roll back decades of progress,” and suggested that his ascension to the Supreme Court might lead to machine guns’ being unleashed on America’s streets; natural disasters’ being met with more “inept, slow, and dangerous” responses from the federal government, and Congress’s being rendered “largely irrelevant” and the president’s being “permitted to make up the rules as he goes.”