WASHINGTON – Senators Clinton and Schumer are asking the Pentagon to spend $123 million of its wartime budget for New York projects that the Department of Defense didn’t ask for – but that in many cases are linked to the senators’ campaign contributors.

The two Democratic senators announced the projects – from a genomics research project at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan to cancer research on Long Island – in press releases this month, touting the impact they would have on the state economy.

But former Pentagon officials and Senator McCain say that the increasing number of “earmarks,” as the projects are known, in the federal budget often divert money that would be better spent by the Defense Department’s normal competitive bidding process. The number of pork barrel projects, including earmarks, has soared to 13,997 in 2005, from 1,439 in 1995, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks earmarks. The projects backed by the senators from New York are included in the conference committee report of a $454 billion defense-spending bill that was approved by the Senate on Wednesday and is awaiting President Bush’s signature.

Mr. McCain, a Republican of Arizona who could face Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 presidential election, lashed out at earmarks in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.

“During a war, in a measure designed to give our fighting men and women the funds they need, the Congress has given in to its worst pork barrel instincts,” Mr. McCain said. “The cumulative effect of these earmarks is the erosion of the integrity of the appropriations process, and by extension, our responsibility to the taxpayer. We must do better, for our soldiers and for the American people. … Our system is broken if we cannot pass a defense bill in wartime without billions of dollars in pork.”

In criticizing earmarks, Mr. McCain highlighted an issue that many top Department of Defense officials have complained about for years. A former undersecretary of defense and chief financial officer at the Defense Department, Dov Zakheim, said earmarks have the potential of sending money to projects that are not necessary instead of to projects that are.

“The problem with earmarks is that they tend to divert money away from programs that the Defense Department requires,” Mr. Zakheim, now a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, said. “And particularly in a time when we are engaged in two conflicts as well as the war on terror, it’s really questionable whether those sorts of earmarks are going to help the troops in the field.”

A deputy undersecretary of defense in the Reagan administration, Stephen Bryen, said the New York items appear this year to range from the significant to the questionable. He said, however, that senators and congressmen often reserve funds for projects on which the military later depends.

“Some of those are sort of frivolous from the point of view of the defense budget,” Mr. Bryen said. “It’s like anything else: Some of it’s pretty good, and some of it is taking care of their friends. That’s what politics is all about. If you think you have a system based on where people who receive donations from their private sector don’t tend to favor their friends, I’d like to see it.”

An earmark is a specific amount of money demanded by a member of Congress for a designated project. Earmarks make their way into spending bills when a group of conferees from both houses of Congress meet privately to reconcile differences between the Senate and House versions of a bill. Once the earmarks are folded into the bill, members of Congress implicitly authorize and mandate them by voting in support of the larger bill.

The joint conference committee that hashed out the final details of this year’s spending bill featured 38 lawmakers, evenly divided between the House and the Senate. The committee was chaired by Senator Stevens, a Republican of Alaska.

A review of the contributions that were made by donors affiliated with New York contractors who ended up winning earmarks suggests that many of the donations are targeted to at least get the attention of the lawmakers who are in the best position to help.

The fact that contractors do look to curry favor with committee members was underscored last month when a Republican of California who was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes.

Two New York congressmen sit on the House Armed Services Committee: Rep. John McHugh, a Republican of Watertown, and Rep. Steven Israel, a Democrat of Long Island. Many of the companies and executives who won earmarks this year donated money not only to Senator Clinton, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and to Mr. Schumer, but also to Mr. Israel. And several of those designated for earmarks gave to members of the Joint Defense Appropriations Conference Committee, which wrote the New York projects into the defense spending bill.

Highlights of the earmarks announced by the Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer include:

* $5 million in taxpayer money to STIDD Systems in Greenport, a company whose president and chief executive officer, Walter Gezari, gave $2,500 to the Friends of Hillary political action committee in May. Mr. Gezari, whose company makes seating for military vessels, gave $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee in March. He has donated $108,350 to federal politicians since 1998. Federal lobbying records show that his company spent $400,000 lobbying Congress this year.

* $1.8 million in taxpayer money to EDO Corporation, an Amityville defense contractor that makes aircraft equipment. The company’s political action committee has given $17,000 to Mr. Israel over the past four years and $15,000 to Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat of Pennsylvania who is the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense. EDO’s political action committee also gave $1,000 to Mr. Schumer’s campaign committee and $853.44 to Boulevard Caterers in Farmingdale for food at a fundraiser for Mr. Schumer. The company spent $1,145 on food for one of Mr. Israel’s fund-raisers in April 2001.

* $8 million in taxpayer money to a publicly traded defense contracting firm, DRS Technologies, and its electronic warfare and network systems program in western New York. The firm’s political action committee gave $8,000 to Friends of Schumer and $30,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, of which Mr. Schumer is the chair. DRS, which is based in Parsippany, N.J., gave Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee $2,000 in May through its DRS Technologies, Incorporated Good Government Fund.

* $2 million in taxpayer money to a Buffalo nanotechnology firm, Nano-Dynamics, Incorporated. Its chairman, Allan Rothstein, contributed $4,400 to the Friends of Hillary political action committee over the past year. Its chief executive officer, Keith Blakely, gave $2,000 to Mr. Schumer’s campaign on October 26, 2004, as did the company’s president, Richard Berger, and its vice president, Glenn Spacht. Mr. Spacht’s contribution to Mr. Schumer was the only political donation he made to a federal campaign last year, according to records at the Federal Election Commission.

* $3.5 million in taxpayer money to SuperPower, Incorporated, a Schenectady subsidiary of Latham-based Intermagnetics General Corporation SuperPower’s president, Philip Pellegrino, gave $3,000 last year to a political action committee operated by Intermagnetics that, in turn, gave $2,000 to Mrs. Clinton this year; $1,000 to Mr. Murtha; and $1,000 to Mr. Stevens.

* $2 million in taxpayer money to Plug Power, Incorporated, a Latham developer of fuel cell technology for redundant power supplies. The company’s president, Roger Saillant, has given $2,000 to the Friends of Hillary committee over the past two years, and $3,000 to the Friends of Schumer committee over the past four.

When asked about their contributions, donors defended them, saying the money was not spent with the expectation of future contracts or federal grants. Some of the larger firms pointed out that contributions are made to numerous politicians; smaller ones simply denied any connection between their contributions and the contracts they won.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Spacht at Nano-Dynamics said, when asked if he expected a return on his contribution to Mr. Schumer. “People make contributions to all sorts of politicians because they believe that those gentlemen or ladies provide the opportunity for superior government, and it’s that simple. Other than that, there’s no reason for me to comment on this.”

The director of government affairs at STIDD Systems, Dave Wilberding, said Mr. Gezari’s contributions to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer represent too small a percentage of the money he gives to politicians in general to be construed as quid pro quo for his most recent federal contract.

“I don’t have the numbers for Walter’s contributions over the past year,” Mr. Wilberding said. “But he’s contributed to a number of different people over the years – Senator Clinton and Senator Schumer and many others where we have gotten no connection to anything we do. So there is no expectation, and not only is there no expectation – that’s illegal.”

A spokeswoman for DRS Technologies, Patricia Williamson, offered a similar defense.

“Members of Congress are prohibited by law from directing or influencing any contract award election,” she said. “Contract awards are strictly regulated, especially within the Department of Defense, by a very defined legal process. So it is inaccurate to state or imply the company will receive $8 million in defense spending as a result of the efforts of members of Congress due to contributions.”

Other noteworthy earmarks, analysts of government waste said, included a $1.5 million grant for genomics research at the American Museum of Natural History and $1.5 million for cancer research at the Center for Women’s Cancer Genetics in Cold Spring Harbor.

The chairman of the natural history museum’s board of trustees, Lewis Bernard, is a prominent donor to mostly Democratic campaigns. He gave $25,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in October 2004, and $25,000 to the presidential campaign of Senator Kerry, a Democrat of Massachusetts, last July, the same day that he gave $25,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Bernard did not return calls for comment.

“If you or I were running the museum, we’d probably be less likely to get the money,” the president of the budget watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, Thomas Schatz, said. “I’m not implying that anything untoward is going on, it’s just that it’s not unusual to see that kind of a relationship.”

Mr. Schatz said the number and value of earmarks have increased over the past decade largely because few people have been paying attention. But, he said, the fact that they are not vetted or voted on and that they are added at the last minute to appropriations bills that members of Congress are loath to hold up should be cause for greater scrutiny. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, earmark spending has more than doubled over the past decade to $27.3 billion this year, from $10 billion in 1995.

Still, some analysts say members of Congress are no less qualified to identify worthwhile projects than the Department of Defense. The chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute and a former director of the Center for Peace and Securities Studies at Georgetown University, Loren Thompson, said that he is reluctant to criticize earmarks in general, despite the appearance they often give of a “pay to play” system.

“Obviously a cancer institute has nothing to do with the military,” Mr. Thompson said. “On the other hand, if you look at the way the Pentagon has compiled its supplemental spending requests for Iraq, you’d be amazed at what they’ve been able to justify for the war. I am unaware of any necessary project the military is seeking that is being denied money, and I say this as a person who is generally considered a hard-liner on defense.”

Mrs. Clinton’s office called the defense programs she supported in next year’s budget “vital.”

“Senator Clinton has asked the Appropriations Committee to support defense projects for New York firms and institutions which will promote our national security, and she is pleased that the Conference Committee agreed in providing funding for these vital projects,” a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, said. Mr. Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Some companies acknowledged the difficulty of securing funds without first attracting the attention of politicians with money. A spokeswoman for Super-Power, Traute Lehner, said federal dollars are necessary to keep the company’s experimental superconductivity program running, and that contributions help.

“We do contribute to a variety of political people we support, and clearly that’s kind of what you need to do to get the kind of support that we need to get the federal funds without which we wouldn’t be able to do the kind of work we do,” Ms.Lehner said. “It’s just helpful to get in their line of vision, and it raises their awareness of what we’re doing. If you can’t tell them your story, how what you’re doing benefits their constituents, you can’t really expect any support.”