Some conservative members of the House Republican majority are sounding the alarm over the billions of dollars allocated to localized pet projects embedded in recently-passed funding bills.
The lower chamber passed two bills on Jan. 22, providing $1.3 trillion in funding for seven government departments. The bills also included billions of dollars in earmarks — projects in members’ congressional districts — a practice that the Republican Conference rejected for a decade.
On the same day, 136 House Republicans — but no Democrats — voted for legislation seeking to strip earmarks from the funding package, but the effort was defeated by a bipartisan coalition.
“Earmarks are the currency of corruption in Washington. They fuel waste, invite abuse, and funnel taxpayer dollars into niche pet projects,” Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Monday. “Republicans should not be embracing this practice, especially in the wake of the recent fraud scandal in Minnesota and with our national debt now exceeding $38 trillion.”
Package earmarks total billions among hundreds of items, and include many multi-million dollar expenditures for localized projects, including $5,746,000 for Alabama Community College, $4,000,000 for Jackson Parish Hospital in Louisiana, $3,049,000 for the University of Nevada, Reno, and $2,304,000 for a Fresno County workforce training project.
Congress informally banned earmarks in 2011 after the process became a nexus for abuse, with a record 15,000 earmarks costing $29 billion in 2005 — including an infamous $80 million project in Alaska dubbed the “Bridge to Nowhere” — as well as bribery scandals involving the earmark process that resulted in convictions. Former President Barack Obama promised in his 2011 State of the Union to veto any legislation with earmarks, saying “the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects.”
“Bringing back earmarks after a decade-long moratorium was a mistake,” Republican South Carolina Ralph Norman told the DCNF in a statement. “The ban existed because earmarks too often led to waste, favoritism, and spending driven by politics instead of priorities, and I’m not convinced today’s transparency rules fix that problem.”
“Congress should absolutely exercise its power of the purse, but that responsibility means spending smarter, not reviving practices that fuel Washington’s spending addiction. With our debt at record levels, taxpayers deserve discipline, not more excuses to spend,” Norman added.
The practice was reintroduced by a Democratic Congress in 2021 with the rebranding of “Community Project Funding” in the House and “Congressionally Directed Spending” in the Senate. Earmark reintroduction, surfaced in former President Joe Biden’s 2022 omnibus funding package and included promises of increased transparency, a ban on for-profit recipients, caps on overall funding, and enhanced auditing.
“You’d never let a pack of hyenas live in your home — You should be no less eager to let Congress earmark,” wroteRepublican Utah Sen. Mike Lee in a Jan. 8 post to X. “There’s a fool-proof way to protect Americans from earmark-related waste, fraud, and abuse: BAN EARMARKS! We’ve done it before; it’s time to do it again—this time for good.”
After 2021, earmarks grew in “the number and amount” each fiscal year. A Department of Agriculture disclosure reports yearly growth in earmarks for the department from FY2022-24, including “$331 million for 237 [earmarked] items in FY2022, $456 million for 329 items in FY2023, and $753 million for 600 items in FY2024.”
“It’s not worth being in Congress if you can’t find ways to help your district,” said Republican Nebraska Rep. Mike Flood, Politico reported. “For all the things that people say are wrong with Congress, this process is working. And it’s working well…And we are bringing this in under budget.”
“You need Democratic votes, right? So let’s not forget that,” said Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, according to Politico. “I’m not here to apologize for, or validate, a bunch of garbage Republican earmarks. But we’d have a much better time at making sure those didn’t prevail if we didn’t need the Democrat votes.”
The third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1796 warned of earmark-like processes emerging as “a scene of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest,” according to Citizens Against Government Waste.
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