ALBANY – New York State’s government, whose Medicaid budget is larger than Texas’s and Florida’s combined, spends millions of taxpayer dollars each year on the entitlement program through secret pork barrel grants.

Along with thousands of other discretionary grants made by lawmakers to their districts, the hidden Medicaid spending emerged yesterday with the release of a list of pork barrel appropriations.

The disclosed grants made between 2003 and 2005 account for hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending, money that is largely unregulated and is dispersed almost completely under the public radar.

Pork spending is a tradition of all statehouses, but in Albany a large chunk of the spending is completely hidden in the budget.

Since 2003, lawmakers have entered the money into budgets as a lump-sum “member-item” appropriation of $200 million, which is split among both houses and the governor. The Senate and the Assembly each receive $85 million and the governor doles out the remaining $30 million.

It used to be that the grants were sprinkled into the budget as individual line items that could be vetoed by the governor. The grants are no longer spelled out in the budgets, and legislative leaders have resisted volunteering the details.

The discretionary funds became public yesterday after a fiscal policy group, the Empire Center for New York State Policy, obtained lists for each of the last three budget years through a Freedom of Information Law request that the group filed with the governor’s budget division.

The documents, which the group posted on its Web site, add up to more than 1,000 pages and list more than 20,000 grants worth a total of $479 million. The lists include the amount of each grant, the recipient, the legislative house from which the money came, the department that administered the funds, and the date the grant was made. They do not provide the purpose for each grant and do not say which lawmaker placed the item request.

While a smattering of lawmakers, particularly those in minority conferences, have called on the Legislature to publish the pork barrel lists, there is little momentum among the leaders to do so.

The lump sum appropriation “exists to allow legislatures to behave as if they are private philanthropists,” the director of the Empire Center, E.J. McMahon, said. “They don’t abide by any of the rules that private philanthropists abide by.”

He said it was an “insult to taxpayers to effectively tell them that how we spend this money is none of your business.”

One of the largest grants is for something called “Medicaid: Clinic Transition Funding,” which the Assembly has doled each year in the amount of $4.9 million. That is on top of the roughly $16 billion the state spends on Medicaid on an annual basis. A spokeswoman for the Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said the money was for “statewide community-based health clinics.”

While short on detail, the lists provide some insight into the priorities of both houses. The Assembly gives out a larger number of statewide grants for social service projects concerning AIDS education, child welfare, worker training, and legal services. Some of them are more political than others. A foundation of NARAL, a powerful pro-choice group whose endorsement many lawmakers solicit, received about $100,000 in 2005.

The Senate made smaller grants to local organizations such as libraries, churches, and little leagues. Both houses gave hundreds of grants to Jewish and Catholic organizations. One beneficiary was the community service branch of Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

The disclosure of the lists yesterday brought a call from the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, for greater transparency in the budget process.

Mr. Silver said yesterday that it was not necessary to release such a list because lawmakers are already boasting about bringing home the bacon.

A spokeswoman for Mr.Silver said the Assembly decided to appropriate the money as a lump sum because in 1998 the governor vetoed many of the Democrats’ items. Lumping everything together gives them protection from the governor’s veto pen, the spokeswoman said.

Mr. McMahon disagreed, saying lawmakers have decided to group the pork spending together because it shields them not from vetoes but from public scrutiny.