rice bowl
n.— «But some also comes from an institutional, bureaucratic drive to have more airplanes and a bigger share of Navy and Defense Department budgets. “The air-systems people saw that whole program as a gigantic rice bowl they could put their hands into,” a critic in the Pentagon said.» —“How Hornet Was Stripped Of Values It Began With” by Richard Halloran in Washington, D.C. New York Times Nov. 23, 1982. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Sean in Oneonta, New York, says that when he was growing up in New Jersey, his family would pile in the car and set off on a surprise adventure, whether a short distance or long, and the kids would be told only that they were going on Buxtehude...