Following a decade-long earmark ban, members of Congress went all out on requesting earmarks in the most recent omnibus spending bill. According to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 included 4,963 earmarks that spend a cumulative total of $9.1 billion.
Lawmakers recently delayed fiscal year 2023 (FY2023) appropriations by extending 2022 spending programs via a continuing resolution (CR) through December 16th. Congress is now preparing an omnibus spending package, comprising all 12 appropriations bills, that will likely span more than 2,500 pages of text. They should steer clear of earmarks and focus on spending reduction instead.
Congressional earmarks, which are more commonly known as “pork‐barrel spending,” were rebranded as “congressionally directed spending” in the U.S. Senate and as “community project funding” in the House of Representatives. Earmarks are specific spending requested by a Member of Congress or a Senator on behalf of an entity, state, locality, or congressional district, that bypasses statutory or administrative formulae or competitive award processes.
Earmarks bypass competitive and other merit‐based funding processes. This can mean a greater misallocation of resources and/or government waste. They encourage lobbying or rent‐seeking, which in itself is an economic cost. Earmarking also costs much of congressional staffs’ and legislators’ time, assuming they do their due diligence. If every member of Congress took full advantage of their 10 earmarks per fiscal year allowance, legislative staff would need to review more than 5,300 earmark requests per year. And earmark requests are unlikely to be spread out evenly on the calendar, likely clustering around fiscal deadlines—like the end of the fiscal year or as CR expiration dates approach.
Instead of spending valuable legislative time lobbying for specific constituents’ pet projects, lawmakers and their staff should focus on reviewing the merits of various federal spending programs and identifying areas where spending can be cut—especially over the next few weeks. They won’t need to look very far to find ample targets:
- The $461 billion that Congress allocated for unauthorized appropriations in 2022 would be a great place to start. Especially, since more than half of this spending went to programs that were set to expire more than 10 years ago. A more thorough review is long overdue.
- Congress should also spotlight programs that received massive cash injections from the COVID stimulus bills, including various loans and grants, income support programs, and state and local aid allocations.
- GAO’s list of high risk programs point to yet more areas where additional oversight is needed.
- CBO’s options to reduce the federal deficit offer an entire chapter focused on discretionary savings.
- The Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Citizens Against Government Waste, among others, also stand at the ready with spending reduction proposals across departments and agencies, for any lawmaker willing to engage in fiscal restraint.
Congress has yet again skirted its responsibility to follow so‐called regular order this September. Instead, lawmakers passed a CR, which is a stop‐gap measure to provide funding for federal government agencies and programs that are subject to annual appropriations. It’s not too late to take a closer look at current spending allocations, before blindly agreeing to continue spending on the same programs through the remainder of FY2023.
If Congress extended all spending in the current CR for the remainder of FY2023, the U.S. would spend $1.707 trillion in discretionary spending. Add to that the $4.2 trillion (without subtracting off‐setting receipts) in mandatory spending the Congressional Budget Office projects for FY2023, and the federal government is projected to spend nearly $6 trillion this year. And even these staggering figures likely understate next year’s federal spending footprint since they do not account for spending by the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, nor the most recent student loan forgiveness by executive order.
Earmarking is a distraction from more fundamental governing responsibilities such as reining in deficit‐inflating spending.
What about the claim that earmarks make it easier to pass legislation? Kevin Kosar and Zachary Courser at the American Enterprise Institute make the case that “the earmark moratorium weakened the House of Representatives’ capacity to coalesce majorities to enact legislation.” That may very well be the case, but what are lawmakers using that capacity for? Lawmakers haven’t used earmarks to coalesce majorities for critical fiscal reforms — just the opposite. Earmarks seem to facilitate more spending, not less.
As the late Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) described during his days in Congress: “I have witnessed earmarking up close and know it is inherently corrupt. Earmarks were abused as a form of currency to buy and sell the votes of politicians and to reward political supporters.” We shouldn’t be overtly encouraging that kind of behavior among our elected representatives.
What about the claim that banning earmarks merely moves the practice behind closed doors? John Hudak at Brookings writes that “earmarks did not disappear with the so‐called ‘earmarks ban’ in 2011; it simply transferred the behavior to the executive branch or made them more secretive within the legislative branch.”
Hudak is referring to so‐called lettermarking or phonemarking, whereby legislators submit specific funding requests directly to agency personnel – who are often eager to comply, especially when receiving such requests from members of appropriations committees who determine their agency’s funding levels. Whether earmarks are allowed in congressional spending bills does not impede lawmakers’ ability to submit spending requests over the phone or in emails. Though, I agree with Hudak that banning earmarks makes letter‐ and phonemarking more likely.
James Dawson and Sam Kleiner argue in the Yale Journal of Regulation that letter‐ and phonemarking violates several legal rules – in addition to being in direct contradiction of executive guidance, such as executive order 13457. Rather than allowing for more loopholes through which Congress may move parochial concerns, we should find better ways of closing such loopholes and enforcing current legal spending guidelines.
I agree with earmark proponents on this point: state and local constituents have a better understanding than Washington bureaucrats of where project funding will do the most good. Which is why we should devolve more responsibilities back to states and localities to address their own needs and priorities without Washington as their middleman. Earmarking is the wrong way to ensure government spending reflects local priorities.
Originally published by the Cato Institute. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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