WASHINGTON — A decade after Republicans in Congress made a show of banning earmarks, they voted Wednesday to join Democrats in bringing them back, acknowledging that the easily mocked spending allocations serve a valuable purpose.
The move caps a decade of Republicans supplanting their traditional fiscal priorities with cultural concerns. And it reflects a growing chorus on the right, left and center that the earmark ban may have actually backfired, despite its good intentions.
Democrats, who now run both chambers of Congress, had already decided they want to revive “community project funding" — as they have tried to rebrand the much-maligned earmarks — which allow members of Congress to direct federal funding to specific projects, typically in their home districts.
Ten years ago, the tea party took to the streets to protest a Democratic-run Washington’s big spending and Republicans rode the backlash back into power in the 2010 election. One of their first moves in Congress was to ban earmarks, which then-House GOP Leader John Boehner said showed “we are dead serious about ending business as usual in Washington.”
Corruption scandals in the 2000s involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the disgraced former congressman infamous for his “bribe menu,” had put earmarks and their potential for abuse top of mind.
The public was concerned about the growing federal deficit, and politicians in both parties found an easy issue to demagogue in so-called pork, which they portrayed as wasteful at best and corrupt at worst. “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it,” then-President Barack Obama said to applause in his 2011 State of the Union address.
Conservative watchdog groups had spent years publicizing (and in some cases distorting) silly-sounding earmarks, like funding for research that involved giving cocaine to monkeys and putting shrimp on treadmills and, most infamously, Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” — which actually went to an airport that is still only accessible by ferry.
Now, though, even as another Democratic president is spending trillions to combat another recession, House Republicans voted by secret ballot to allow earmarks.
The argument: Earmarks will allow Republicans to have a say in where the funding goes, instead of simply letting President Joe Biden decide.
“There's a real concern about the administration directing where money goes,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters after the vote. “This doesn't add one more dollar. I think members here know what's most important about what's going on in their district, not Biden.”
Republicans approved trillions of dollars in new spending and tax cuts under former President Donald Trump, who spoke favorably of earmarks and pardoned Cunningham, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for accepting bribes in exchange for earmarking spending to military contractors.
At the same time, many began to realize that earmarks had helped grease Congress’ wheels, did little to grow the deficit and put spending decisions in the hands of elected representatives, instead of unelected bureaucrats.
“The earmark moratorium failed: It did not reduce discretionary spending, it increased congressional polarization, and it undermined coalition building,” wrote Zachary Courser and Kevin Kosar of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that promotes cooperation, concluded that the moratorium “may have done more harm than good when it comes to bipartisanship,” noting that the lawmaking process has “stagnated in the same period since earmarks disappeared.”
A group of around 40 leading congressional scholars signed an open letter last month supporting the resurrection of earmarks, saying the ban had led to “more legislative gridlock,” even as members of Congress found ways around the ban that are even less transparent.
“Troublingly, the earmark moratorium has encouraged legislators to attempt to direct spending through the secretive practices of lettermarking and phonemarking, wherein lawmakers write to and call executive branch agencies to advocate for favorable treatment,” they wrote.
Congressional leaders also lost one of their main tools for keeping their caucus in line when they could no longer incentivize rank-and-file members to take tough votes with the promise of funding for projects back home, making the House even more ungovernable, as first Boehner and then former GOP Speaker Paul Ryan quit in frustration.
The earmark ban also cut lawmakers out their traditional role in the appropriation process and contributed to the rise of massive omnibus spending bills that get rushed through with little input or oversight from individual lawmakers, making it easier for them to reject the entire bill and contributing to a string of recent government shutdowns, proponents of earmarks say.
The ban was intended to cut spending, but the money gets spent either way. It’s just a question of who decides where it goes — members of Congress or executive branch officials, who use formulas intended to impartially assess the merit of proposed projects.
“In theory, conservatives should oppose earmarks,” Alyssa Farah, Trump’s former White House communications director, said on Twitter. “In practice, the earmark ban ended up ceding the power of the purse to the Executive, leading to bigger government, bigger spending, and less congressional oversight.”
Still, some conservatives say Republicans are now turning their back on a fundamental tenet of conservatism, with Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, equating earmarks to “legislative bribery.”
“They can call it earmarks, they can call it ‘community projects,’ they can call it a bridge to nowhere. No matter what you call it, it's the currency of corruption,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which sprung up to fight Obama’s spending.
Lobbyists are excited, but Americans still have a dim view of earmarks — though the salience of the issue has fallen off. A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found only 22 percent of registered voters supported bringing back earmarks, compared to 38 percent who opposed the idea. But the biggest group, 4 in 10, had no opinion.
There’s a reason Republicans took their vote to approve earmarks on a secret ballot. And it’s still easier to find members of Congress publicly condemning earmarks than supporting them.
“In private, when their voters don't know what they're doing, they're willing to go back to corrupt earmarks. But are they really going to go back and do that and in public?” said Martin, who is asking members to Congress to pledge not to use earmarks just because they can.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the new reforms will make “community project funding” more transparent and accountable than the old-fashioned earmarks.
Requests will now have to be made online, money cannot go to for-profit corporations and requests are limited in size and number. The member of Congress requesting the money has to certify that they and their family have no financial interest in the project and they have to provide “evidence of community support” for it, while the Government Accountability Office will audit a sample of earmarks regularly to check for issues.
“Community Project Funding restores balance on important decisions about how and where to spend taxpayer dollars, allowing Members of Congress to bring their knowledge and experience to the decision-making,” she said in a statement.
