Return of the congressional earmark zombie

Much like a Hollywood movie monster franchise, earmarks are back in the federal government. Congress’s $1.5 trillion omnibus bill contains pages upon pages of so-called “member-directed spending” for hundreds of pet projects in congressional districts across the country. Senator Mike Braun put the final earmark count at $8 billion, taking up 367 pages of the 2,700-page bill that funds the government through the end of the fiscal year.

Congress banned earmarks in 2011 thanks to a rather rare show of bipartisanship by House Republicans and then-President Barack Obama. Congressional bipartisanship then unanimously brought back earmarks last year. Supporters promised that the member-directed spending would be more transparent and accountable and reduce dysfunction in the budget process. They also vowed that member-directed activities would be meaningful and transform the community.

Supporters hailed the return of earmarks as something that benefits all Americans. “[T]hey serve a real purpose, allowing legislators — who well understand the needs of their districts/states — to target funds for important projects that can solve policy problems and create jobs,” wrote John Hudak of the Brookings Institution. Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru saw the earmark return as a way to “slightly strengthen” a weak Congress against the all-powerful executive branch. He also noted that Congress isn’t worried about too much spending, as it was when the ban first went in place.

One of the most common refrains for the use of earmarks is that they represented “only” 3 percent of the federal budget at their peak in 2005, and drastically fell afterward. “Despite the historically prevailing narrative that earmarks helped drive ballooning deficits and amounted to a significant portion of discretionary spending, the reality is they had little effect,” American Enterprise Institute scholars Kevin Kosar and Zachary Courser commented last year in a paper arguing for a return to the earmarking practice. “Earmarks, barely visible in the figure [that looked at earmark spending in relation to total discretionary spending], account for roughly 1 percent of discretionary spending in most appropriation bills.”

While there’s truth to this, it makes zero sense to argue in favor of more spending in an era when the federal government refuses any fiscal restraint. $8 billion for earmarks in the omnibus bill is an insane amount and not something that Congress or any American should welcome. Americans for Tax Reform and Citizens Against Government Waste have highlighted $3 million going to Palo Alto, California, for a museum on the city’s heritage. Palo Alto’s residents include Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Rothschild from Facebook and Google’s Larry Page. Couldn’t these extremely wealthy men, and the six others on Forbes’s richest American list, band together to donate the money for the museum?

Another line of defense regarding earmarks involves the transfer of power from the legislative branch of government to the executive. “[W]hen Congress fails to direct spending in specific ways, the executive branch performs that duty for them,” Hudak commented. “In that sense, Republican House members and senators who oppose legislative earmarks are working to transfer additional power to allocate federal funds to Democratic President Joe Biden.” In other words, better for Congress to misuse the money than the presidency.

Congress remained involved in the so-called presidential earmarking game by sending letters to government agencies requesting funds. This practice of lettermarking is a symptom of the federal government’s scope of power and influence on daily lives. The actual solution is meaningful budget cuts and reducing the scope of governmental power, not shifting the process from a lettermark to an earmark.

Perhaps the biggest earmark fallacy involves the ability to get legislation passed. Kosar and Courser write that congressional leadership sometimes offered earmarks for votes. “While these offers were more commonly made to majority members, three of the former members in our sample had also observed earmarks being offered to minority members in exchange for a vote.” Other earmark supporters raised concerns about the inability of leadership to control its own caucus. Brookings senior fellow Jonathan Rausch told Reason in 2015 that earmarks were “something that you could do to bring that reluctant person along” when it came to votes.

Yet Congress’s first vote on a budget including earmarks remained as partisan as ever. Democrats mostly voted in favor of the omnibus bill last month while most Republicans voted against it. The New York Times noted that New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan opposed the bill despite raking in a combined $80 million in earmarks. That said, Republican Senators Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham and Richard Shelby all voted for the bill and grabbed hundreds of millions of dollars for their state. Those three votes wouldn’t have swung the bill one way or another, but it’s still worth noting.

There’s still a major danger to using earmarks within the halls of government. The Constitution says nothing about Congress getting pet projects for states. The government’s deficit and debt continue to grow with no end in sight. Earmarks and lettermarks need to go. Fiscal responsibility, no matter how small, depends on it.