House Republicans embrace earmarks and fail to demonstrate fiscal responsibility
Sean Kennedy
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Earmarks are again becoming firmly entrenched in Congress.
In a sign that the new Republican House majority may not be serious about fiscal discipline, the conference voted 158 to 52 on Nov. 30 to reject an amendment offered by Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) that would have banned earmarks for the 118th Congress. While the adoption of the amendment was seen as a long shot, the vote demonstrated that support for earmarks among Republicans has markedly increased in a short period of time. On March 17, 2021, the House Republican Conference voted 102-84 to agree to the restoration of earmarks in the 117th Congress. The 2022 vote represents a 55% increase in support for these pork-barrel projects.
12 WOKE EARMARKS IN OMNIBUS SPENDING BILL
This rise in popularity is distressing news to anyone familiar with the history of earmarks. Beginning in fiscal 2011, Congress operated under an earmark moratorium for 11 years. This was deemed necessary after a series of scandals that resulted in members of Congress, staff, and lobbyists serving jail terms. The incoming class of Republicans apparently is either unaware or does not care that earmarks are one of the most corrupt, costly, and inequitable practices in the history of Congress.
While Citizens Against Government Waste identified billions of dollars in earmarks in each year of the moratorium using the definition it adopted in 1991, the cost and number of the projects were lower than they had been. In the nine years during the earmark moratorium that members of Congress approved the 12 appropriations bills that fund the federal government, legislators added, on average, 192 earmarks costing $9.4 billion. In the nine preceding years, Congress approved bills with, on average, 9,542 earmarks costing $20.9 billion.
Unfortunately, the reinstatement of an open system of earmarking in fiscal 2022 returned the cost close to the pre-moratorium totals. Legislators added 5,138 earmarks costing $18.9 billion in fiscal 2022, which is only $2 billion less than the average annual amount prior to the moratorium.
Earmarks are a corrupt, cynical, and lazy method of governing, and the practice also benefits the most powerful legislators. In fiscal 2022, the 89 members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, constituting 17% of Congress, got 41% of the earmarks and 29% of the money. Earmarks also lead to vote buying and inflated spending and circumvent the existing system of awarding funding using a competitive process that identifies recipients with the greatest need.
In fiscal 2022, 393 legislators, or 73.5% of Congress, received earmarks, broken down by party as 99.3% of Democrats and 45.8% of Republicans. With two-thirds of House Republicans now supporting the practice and only a handful of Democrats opposed, the number of members of Congress bringing home the bacon will undoubtedly increase. Although representatives can receive no more than 10 projects (senators face no limitation), and the projects are limited to nonprofit entities, there is nothing to stop Congress from changing those rules to allow unbridled earmarks again.
One of the arguments made in favor of earmarks is that Congress, not the executive branch, should be determining how to spend money under its Article 1 constitutional power of appropriations. But with earmarks limited to 1% of spending, the argument should not be convincing. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and former Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) argued in a 2017 op-ed, “instead of reviving earmarks, which would ultimately only further weaken the legislative branch … Congress can use the authorization process to reform how federal agencies spend taxpayer dollars to ensure the process for selecting funding priorities and recipients is transparent, merit-based and consistent with congressional intent.”
There will be further opportunities for the incoming Republican House majority to set limits on spending and make the federal government more efficient, but they are not off to a promising start. Perhaps it will take a few new members of Congress to be sentenced to jail for the corrupt use of earmarks for the mindset to again shift in the direction of sound fiscal stewardship.
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Sean Kennedy is the director of research for Citizens Against Government Waste.