An earmark is a line-item in congressional legislation that allocates a specified amount of money for a specific project, program, or organization. Conveniently for lawmakers, the taxpayer dollars that are allocated for these specific purposes bypass customary budgetary procedures, and often the American people never hear about them. You may know this better as “pork.”

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This entire topic is just vomit. Instead of intelligent compromise and altruistic collaboration, Congress uses the American people’s money as their very own re-election fund, exchanging their vote for money to fund their local pet projects (remember the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere?”). The highly corrupt process ensures that the funding of these projects is based on power instead of merit, and they clearly exemplify one of the most fundamental problems with our government: a lack of transparency that leads to a significant absence of accountability.

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Congress’ exploitation of the earmark is so shady that it often borders on criminal. There is no other way to say it: These special projects, regardless of their worthiness, are straight up bribery. It’s absolutely flabbergasting that we let them get away with this. Because our dysfunctional two-party system has completely broken down, Congress has decided to pass legislation by simply paying one another off.  Paying. One. Another. Off. 

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…in the United States of America.  Not Colombia, not Mexico, not Guatemala, not Ghana. The United States of America.

 

The crazies have officially taken over the asylum and they have our checkbook.  This is how the world’s greatest democracy legislates?  This is the level of corruption, malpractice and irresponsibility that we have decided to accept? No. Just no. No! No! No! No! Earmarks alone are reason enough to bust up the little party our members of Congress are having in Washington. This is not the way to run a country. This snake oil, smoke and mirrors, sideshow approach to governing is absurd.

 

Earmarks were technically “banned” in 2011, but that was pretty much a joke. In fact, Citizens Against Government Waste’s annual Congressional Pig Book < is that the greatest name of anything, ever? > revealed that Congress attached earmarks to all 12 appropriations bills during the so-called ban, adding on average 192 earmarks costing $9.4 billion. Yes, you read that right. Even though there was an actual law prohibiting Congress from adding earmarks to legislation, they just completely ignored it and did it anyway. We guess laws just don’t apply to them. In any country and in any language, that is the very definition of corruption.

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Earmarks were brought back by the House in FY2022. Senate Democrats also voted to bring them back, but Senate Republicans voted to uphold the ban. Before you get too impressed by this moral stand, their agreement was nonbinding and many of them received earmarks anyway. The 2024 Congressional Pig Book exposed 8,222 earmarks costing $22.7 billion. That brings the grand total to 132,434 earmarks costing $460.3 billion since FY1991. The Pig Book also revealed that “earmarks continue to provide the most benefit to the most powerful legislators. In FY2024, the 90 members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, making up only 17 percent of Congress, were responsible for 42.2 percent of the earmarks and 35.2 percent of the money. Three of the top five recipients by dollar amount serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and a fourth is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). 

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Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) claimed the most earmarks in FY 2024. Her 231 earmarks cost $575,580,000, which is $109,429,721, or 23.5 percent more than the legislator in second place, Senate Appropriations Committee member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who received 185 earmarks costing $466,370,279.

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Three more senators rounded out the top five: Senator Angus King (I-ME), who received 186 earmarks costing $453,591,043; Senate Appropriations Committee member Brian Schatz (D-HI), who received 114 earmarks costing $ 428,634,250; and Senate Majority Leader Schumer, who received 227 earmarks costing $421,738,113. These five legislators, constituting just 0.93 percent of the 535 members of Congress, together received $2,345,913,685, or 10.3 percent of the total cost of the FY 2024 earmarks, the same percentage the top five claimed in FY 2023.”

 

Are you kidding us with this?

 

Most recently, Republicans in the U.S. Senate paid off Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska so she would vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill after threatening to vote against it over concerns about the bill’s cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.

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Who knows if she ever really cared about these cuts, but she certainly leveraged the heck out of them – getting tax breaks for Alaskan whaling captains and fisheries, plus a special exception to lessen the pain of the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

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The SNAP sweetener is particularly insightful, showing just how inefficient and incompetent Congress can be. As the One Big Beautiful Bill cuts federal funding for food stamps by $186 billion over ten years, the plan is for the administration of the programs to totally shift to the states.

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However, Senator Murkowski made sure Alaska was exempt from this rule in exchange for her vote. But then the question became how would the Senate do this? Well, turns out that Alaska has the distinction of being the state with the highest rate of incorrect payments in food stamp programs. So, your “leaders” decided the best way to facilitate Senator Murkowski’s demands was to delay federal cuts for states with the highest rates of erroneous payments – which effectively rewards states whose food stamp programs have the most errors and are the most inefficient. Great job, guys!

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This absurdity didn’t seem to bother Senator Murkowski in the least. She reveled in her good fortune, saying, “Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.”

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Other goodies in the One Big Beautiful Bill include tax breaks for the rum industry in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and coal used in steel production; $300 million to protect Donald when he stays at Mar-a-Lago and his other clubs in Virginia and New Jersey; $1.2 billion for the Secret Service to protect him and his family everywhere else; $150 million to help celebrate American’s 250th anniversary; $10 billion for missions to the moon; $40 million for the creation of the National Garden of American Heroes; $85 million to move the space shuttle Discovery from a Smithsonian museum just outside Washington to a NASA-run museum in Houston for Senator John Cornyn (R-TX); and a significant increase in subsidies for large and profitable farms and farmers in Southern states.

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These are pretty good, but some of our favorite examples of earmarks showed up in FY2020, when Congress included $15.9 billion worth. Examples that year included $2.1 billion for twenty-two F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft that, by the way, the Pentagon didn’t even request (plus, doesn’t the Pentagon have their own astronomical budget already?); wild horse and burro management ($25.8 million); money to get rid of the poor little brown tree snake ($663,000); and $65,000,000 for Pacific coastal salmon recovery.

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Listen, we love the Pacific coastal salmon as much as the next guy, but could whoever’s in charge of their recovery not get it done with the $65,000,000 they received in both FY2018 AND FY 2019? We’ll do the math for you. In just those three years, the United States of America spent $195,000,000 on this one fish.

 

Seriously?  People, we have eighth graders who can’t read.

 

“Underwater pests” – whatever the heck that means – should be super jealous of the Pacific coastal salmon, because they only got $39,325,000 in FY2020. But all the other fishies shouldn’t worry, they weren’t forgotten entirely! “Fish passage” and “fish screens” – again, whatever the heck that means – were funded in FY2020 with $11,400,000 of American taxpayer money.

 

If you’re looking for President Trump to nip this in the bud in his second term, don’t get your hopes up. Not long into his first one, before the “ban” was lifted, he said to members of Congress: “Maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks. Our system lends itself to not getting things done, and I hear so much about earmarks – the old earmark system – how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks.”

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Hey, we would be friendly too if someone handed me $65,000,000 to recover salmon. But let’s get real, coming from the most transactional human being to ever sit in the Oval Office, that statement alone is evidence enough that earmarks are bad news.

 

Some people (mainly in Washington, naturally) would say that my animosity toward earmarks is a disproportionate response. After all, earmarks accounted for less than 2 percent of President Obama’s $410 billion spending bill, signed less than two months after he took office. 

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Overlooking the fact that earmarks were less than 2 percent of an exceptionally bloated budget – and that the projects included thirteen that were driven by a lobbying firm accused of passing illegal campaign contributions to congressmen – when did $7.7 billion become inconsequential? In fact, though the $410 billion was to fund the government for less than seven months, the earmarks in the bill equaled 16.5 percent of the entire 2010 budget for the Department of Education, 29 percent of the Department of Energy’s budget, and 32 percent of the budget for the Department of Justice.  

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It’s also important to remember that this occurred right after the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis, at a time when we had just spent billions on an unprecedented financial bailout. Because the supposed purpose of the congressional rescue was to stabilize our financial system and to strengthen it, one would hope that Congress would have been extra careful with our money.

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Ha! As if. Even in a time of devastating crisis, they just couldn’t help themselves. Amid the largest financial calamity in decades, and when the only concern should have been the protection of our economic future, our leaders crammed billions of dollars-worth of tax breaks into the bill at the very last minute – to the tune of $6.6 billion. These included $6 million for the manufacturers of wooden arrows for children, $192 million for Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands rum producers, and $128 million for auto racetrack owners. Representative John Murtha (D-PA), who himself included projects totaling $111 million, was quick to explain that people really shouldn’t be annoyed with the clandestine add-ons, because the $6.6 billion in earmarks were just an itty-bitty percentage of “what the administration wants to bail out those rich guys in New York.”

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That is just a gross thing to say. Everyone in Washington knows full well that Americans are suspicious of earmarks in the very best of times. But in a time of economic crisis, when we were already on the hook for billions and billions of dollars, shoving even more billions of dollars-worth of earmarks into a spending bill feels like nothing less than a slap in the face. 

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If our leaders will blatantly squander billions against strong public dissent, how can we possibly feel confident that they make any prudent decisions on our behalf?

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The oink-oink in President Obama’s spending bill was even more frustrating given that he promised multiple times during his presidential campaign to finally correct the egregious practice. Although Senator Obama requested 112 earmarks totaling more than $330 million in 2007, presidential candidate Obama declared, “We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’ seniority, rather than the merit of the project. The entire earmark process needs to be re-examined and reformed.” On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama specifically said, “I’ve pledged to slash earmarks by more than half when I am President of the United States.”  He went on to say, “I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line, and eliminate programs that don’t work and aren’t needed.” To be fair, we guess he eventually (kind of) tried with the toothless “ban,” but not before he allowed $7.7 billion to slip through the net.

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It was difficult even back then to find a member of Congress who would publicly defend earmarks – even though almost all of them jammed them into legislation – but those who did publicly defend them claimed earmarks are simply a harmless way to fund worthy projects in their districts. 

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Senator Dan Inouye (D-HI), then chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, came out swinging after critics slammed the number of earmarks in President Obama’s inaugural spending bill. He cited the creation of programs like the F-22, the C-17, and the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: “I dare anyone to suggest these are evil projects. It has helped to shorten the war. It has helped to save lives. It will bring back the brave men and women from Iraq. I think these few should remind us that earmarks are not evil.”

 

Again, Senator, we will remind you that the Department of Defense has its own enormous budget. Why didn’t you just transparently appropriate money for these non-evil projects in that? In addition to the military bonanza, other earmarks attached to the bill involved swine odor, tattoo removal, Mormon crickets, and lighthouses. Whether these projects sound ridiculous to us or not, this conversation is not about judging the merit of them. Not every earmark is evil, wasteful or crooked. But, again, what’s with the secrecy?

 

If members of Congress are so proud of their decisions, why not openly share the worthiness of their hometown projects with those of us who pay for them instead of covertly attaching them to unrelated legislation? Why not be completely transparent, eliminate earmarks, and pass standalone legislation to fund all these goodies? 

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Back in 2010, Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) agreed: “At a time when families are struggling to balance their budgets, when workers are concerned about losing their jobs, when states are struggling to maintain service levels, it’s unconscionable Congress won’t end its addiction to earmarks.” That would have been a heroic stance if Senator Martinez’s earmarks in the spending bill hadn’t totaled $106.7 million. When asked about his hypocrisy, Senator Martinez’s spokesman said, “Florida taxpayers are federal taxpayers and until all earmarks are stripped, Florida deserves its fair share” …which pretty much sums the entire problem up in a nutshell, no?

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And the examples just go on and on and on. Before Obama, one of President George W. Bush’s spending bills, worth $555 billion and signed at the end of 2007, passed with over 9,000 earmarks, at the time the second largest number in U.S. history. Addressing his spending bill, President Bush said, “These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful government spending.”  But, of course, he signed it anyway. Not only did President Bush sign the bill, but he also requested thousands of earmarks of his very own, including $6.5 million for research on the “fundamental properties of asphalt” and $330 million to eradicate plant pests like the light brown apple moth and the sirex woodwasp. All in, President Bush and Congress had a huge year in 2007.

 

In the Iraq Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act – a 2007 emergency appropriations bill to address military spending in Iraq – they covertly attached $21 billion (House) and $18 billion (Senate) of non-war spending. This nonsense included $100 million for the Democratic and Republican national conventions, $3.5 million to fund tours of the Capitol, $13 million for ewe lamb replacement and retention, $74 million for peanut storage, $95 million for dairy producers, and $24 million for sugar beet growers. These all, of course, were buried deep, deep, deep within the bill. The $100 million given for the conventions was included in a section called “Katrina recovery, veterans’ care and for other purposes.” Interesting. 

 

We would certainly never diminish the importance of the sugar beet, but the funding of what we can only assume is some sort of plant should be addressed elsewhere, not hidden in a bill whose sole concern should be the safety and care of our military. And screw the national conventions. We're sure Congress has other ways to pilfer our money for those. We cannot imagine a more insulting tribute to our troops.