Far-right Republicans in Congress have pushed the federal government near the brink of shutting down in recent months in their quest to cut the budget. But many of them have also signaled that they do like some federal spending — at least when they’re steering the money to their own districts.
Lawmakers have long used what are known as earmarks, with which members of Congress can request funding for pet projects, to help move spending legislation along. The practice was cut back in 2011 but has since returned, with new rules and more transparency.
Now a bloc of conservatives in the House — who have loudly opposed several measures to fund the government since the fall — are on track to direct a total of $371.8 million back to their home districts through individual requests. They stand to take credit for federal funding for projects important to their constituents even if they vote against the legislation that includes the money.
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“In the old days, if you got an earmark, you were expected to vote for the legislation. And now the fact that you can get the earmark and at the same time vote against the legislation, appropriators back in the ’80s would have been baffled by that,” said Kevin Kosar, who studies Congress and lawmaking at the center-right American Enterprise Institute.
Congress has faced three government shutdown deadlines since September, and another looms in March. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have agreed on a $1.66 trillion framework to fund the government for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
But far-right members of Johnson’s caucus have reacted to that deal and to several short-term government funding laws with fury. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of archconservatives that has antagonized GOP leadership for nearly a decade, called the agreement a “total failure.”
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Yet many of them have also put in earmark requests, according to a Washington Post review of annual spending legislation. Many of those lawmakers justified the requests by pointing to what they said were crucial needs back home. They said their opposition to larger underlying bills didn’t conflict with comparatively modest spending for their communities.
Congress still must pass the annual spending, or appropriations, bills to officially greenlight the earmark funding. Some far-right Republicans did vote for earlier versions of those bills that passed the House but stood no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate and becoming law. And they now oppose the deal between Johnson and Schumer that is Congress’s best chance to fund the government.
Overall, for the 2024 government spending cycle, House appropriators granted 4,715 earmark requests worth $7.4 billion: $4.5 billion for Republicans and $2.7 billion for Democrats, according to committee disclosures, plus more than $100 million more in bipartisan earmarks. Those requests still must be reconciled with separate submissions from the Senate.
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That’s a lot of money, but also a minuscule share of the $1.66 trillion discretionary budget Congress is working to allocate — and an even tinier share of overall spending, which topped $6.13 trillion in fiscal year 2023, primarily because of Social Security and Medicare.
Still, some lawmakers who have blasted government spending are also contributing to it through earmarks.
Rep. Randy Weber (R-Tex.) is set to win $144.3 million in community project funds for his district, which spans East Texas from Beaumont to south of Galveston along the Gulf of Mexico.
The bulk of that money — $100 million — will go toward deepening the Sabine-Neches Waterway, a crucial freight passage on the Texas-Louisiana border, to accommodate larger watercraft traveling to the busy Port of Beaumont and harden it against intensifying hurricanes and tropical storms.
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“For us, this is huge, huge, huge,” Weber said. “We want to protect the citizens of the Gulf Coast, protect the energy we use and, of course, protect the environment.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who led a revolt among far-right lawmakers to oust former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over spending issues, is slated to get $50 million for his district on the Florida Panhandle for a helicopter hangar at Naval Air Station Whiting Field.
House appropriators approved $42.1 million and $39.6 million, respectively, for Reps. Ben Cline (Va.) and Andy Harris (Md.), leading GOP spending hawks. (Harris voted for a November law to prevent a government shutdown but opposed similar measures in September and January.)
Cline’s project would widen portions of I-81, a major interstate that snakes through central and western Virginia. Harris’s 14 earmarks cover various infrastructure improvements on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
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Representatives for Gaetz and Harris did not respond to requests for comment.
Share this articleShare“This is the only project I’ve requested for any appropriations bill,” Cline told The Post. “I have impressed upon [appropriators] that this is my top priority, and hopefully that does carry more weight.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) drew $26.2 million in earmarks for infrastructure projects and a new Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture and Mathematics Innovation Center at Louisiana State University at Eunice.
He opposed a deal last spring between McCarthy and President Biden to suspend the nation’s debt limit and set totals for future discretionary spending, the agreement that underpins the current budget talks. He also voted against three short-term bills to prevent government shutdowns in September, November and January.
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“These projects are born of the most pure interests of the American people and I make no apologies for my success in the arena of [community project funding],” Higgins said in a statement. “However, I will always oppose massive overspending in the federal budget that overwhelmingly does not meet those same standards, and for that principled opposition, I also make no apology.”
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who supported stopgap legislation to keep the government open, is on track to get Congress’s largest earmark of the 2024 cycle: $237 million for maintenance of a lock along the Tennessee River.
Earmarks, known as “congressionally directed spending” by boosters and decried as “pork-barrel spending” by opponents, have been around for generations. Party leaders once doled them out to whip votes on pieces of legislation: Lawmakers would back bills because they included local projects they sought to fund.
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The practice was useful, but it also led to abuses. Notorious examples of wasteful spending led Congress to nix earmarks in 2011. One proposed 2005 earmark for a remote Alaskan bridge, often called the “bridge to nowhere,” would have cost $398 million. In 2006, a federal judge sentenced former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) to more than eight years in prison for leveraging earmarks to elicit bribes from defense contractors.
Congress brought back earmarks in 2021 after years of advocacy from some lawmakers who said their districts were missing out on crucial funds. But the spending requests returned with significant restructuring. Earmarks have new transparency requirements, rules on the kinds of projects eligible and procedures that divorce spending requests from party leaders’ control. Lawmakers must post their requests on their congressional websites and certify that they and their immediate family do not have financial interest in the proposed projects.
Still, even the term “earmark” has a bad reputation among some lawmakers.
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“They’re not called earmarks, because that’s a bad connotation. Back in the day, they were abused and misused by the people in power,” Weber told The Post.
Some experts still say the requests are tinged with too much political influence, which can affect how projects are selected and distract from larger spending issues.
“Both the old way and new way of doing earmarks are still more politics than policy,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Federal officials who can broadly evaluate the U.S. government’s spending needs without the appearance of political interference would be better at choosing projects to fund, she said.
The projects also sometimes allow politicians to highlight what they see as wasteful spending, MacGuineas said, while ignoring the main drivers of the federal deficit. Under the 2022 rules, earmarks can cover no more than 1 percent of non-defense-related discretionary spending. Mandatory programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, take up the vast majority of federal dollars.
“This is a very small fraction of the budget, and it absorbs an inordinate amount of attention, compared to the much bigger programs and how those dollars are spent,” MacGuineas said. “But on the other hand, millions of dollars are millions of dollars. And every million dollars spent is a million in taxes that some group of people had to pay, and we should spend it as best we can.”
Lawmakers say earmarks are an important part of legislating and provide funding for crucial projects. Some members of Congress say it’s better for elected officials to decide which projects to fund than to leave those decisions to unelected federal workers.
“I have been trying to take authority away from the massive federal bureaucracy and restore it to the actual representatives of the people here in Congress,” Cline said. “The bureaucrats in the Education Department, the Transportation Department, the Commerce Department know less about the priorities of the working men and women of the 6th District of Virginia than their elected representatives.”
Even Democrats frustrated with GOP colleagues in the House for trying to block spending bills don’t begrudge Republicans who direct money back to their districts.
Linking earmarks to floor support for one bill or another smacks of bribery, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), Capitol Hill’s chief earmark evangelist, told The Post: “If we turn it into simply, ‘You don’t get the project, if you’re not for the bill,’ then it becomes just sort of buying votes.”
That kind of directed spending is also good for Congress’s institutional reputation, said Hoyer, 84, who earlier in January said he would run for his 23rd term representing a Southern Maryland district home to tens of thousands of federal workers.
His district is set to receive $10.6 million for infrastructure projects and youth and anti-homelessness nonprofits. Making those requests forces lawmakers to pay attention to what their communities need, Hoyer said, and allows them to show their constituents tangible results, something he hopes will increase voters’ confidence in Congress and democracy.
“I can go to somebody in my district and if they’ve got a problem I can help them,” he said. “That connection is a very important one. And I think the fact is, it also focuses members on their districts.”
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