What lawmakers slipped into the $460 billion spending package
What lawmakers slipped into the $460 billion spending package
For the federal government, the 2024 fiscal year started in October of last year, but this funding — at least a portion of it — didn’t make it through Congress and to the President’s desk until last weekend. Now that it’s done, policy wonks in and out of Washington are digging through the six funding bills and the earmarks attached to them.
Earmarks are sort of like footnotes on funding bills, promising to spend money on specific projects requested by individual members of Congress.
Earmarks were banned for about a decade after some high-profile scandals and examples of waste.
But since they were brought back a few years ago, “there’s a requirement to demonstrate community support for projects which didn’t exist in the past. For-profit organizations, companies are not eligible to receive them,” said Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “There is an overall cap on the amount of money that Congress can direct in this way, and the system that we have now is the most transparent that it has ever been in our history.”
You can go to the House Appropriations Committee website and find lists of earmarks, as well as who requested them.
In this latest package, there are more than 6,000 earmarks totaling more than $12 billion, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government. That’s less than 3% of the total spending package.
And it includes funds for things like “infrastructure projects, help for police, affordable housing,” said Diana Evans, a professor emerita of political science at Trinity College who has studied earmarks for decades.
In this batch, “for Republicans, it tends to be more large infrastructure projects,” she noted. “So actually, Republican spending is greater than Democratic spending on earmarks because of the size of the projects that they’re earmarking.”
Even with the new rules, there’s still a lot of politicking when it comes to earmarking.
“The closer you are to the seat of power, the more likely you are to get earmarks. So appropriators writing the bills get more earmarks than people not writing the bills,” noted Joshua Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense. “And also we’re seeing people who are in tough elections tend to get earmarks, as opposed to folks who are in safe districts.”
Because whether a member of Congress voted for the final package or not, money for any earmarks they slipped in will still end up in their districts — and the projects will end up in their campaign ads.
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