With Congress teeing up the last government funding bill of the fiscal year, the appropriations process for 2025 is just about finished, and with it, there is little remaining hope for one of Congress’ favorite legislative pursuits: earmarks.
For the vast majority of Republicans who submitted requests for community project funding — the less physiological and more bureaucratic name for earmarks — one word came up again and again.
“It’s disappointing,” said Rep. Troy Balderson, who requested $40 million for his district, primarily for improving drinking water and repairing roads.
“I’m disappointed, because I will defend every one of our community funding projects,” said Rep. Darin LaHood, who requested $72 million for his district.
“It’s disappointing that there are some really good projects in there — in fact, all of them are — that needed to get done,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, whose 15 proposed projects totaling $78 million included constructing a new elementary school on an Air Force base and building a youth development center for the Boys & Girls Club of America that would have served 300 kids per day.
“It would have been nice to get them done, but those had to be put off this year,” Simpson said.
The latest funding bill, presented as a mostly clean continuing resolution by Republican leadership, is 99 pages. It includes hundreds of changes in line-items and billions in cuts to non-defense spending. What it doesn’t include, however, is earmarks, which are capped at 1% of discretionary spending.
On a technical level, earmarks could have been included in the bill, though they’re almost exclusively included in regular appropriations bills, not continuing resolutions. But this legislation is hardly a straight continuing resolution. And the reason GOP leadership gave for the earmarks exclusion, two members told NOTUS, was to avoid a repeat of December when specific projects got attacked and it tanked the whole bill.
The funding is requested by members and goes to projects within their districts. The vast majority of the Republican conference submitted millions each in requests for their communities. While projects that are outside of members’ districts can certainly look like government waste, the ones inside their districts — like renovating wells, treating wastewater, repairing schools and building bridges — are often key arguments for reelection.
It’s why many lawmakers will tolerate a spending bill loaded up with pork — as long as they also get to bring home the bacon in the legislation.
For newer members, earmarks are one of the few tools they have to show constituents that they’re actually making a difference, while they await higher-level committee assignments and more influence to pass bills.
Of course, earmarks were outlawed in the House in 2011 under then-Speaker John Boehner. The practice had become marred by waste, like the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and scandals, with two lawmakers even serving jail time over earmarks.
When then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi revived earmarks in 2021, Congress put new restrictions in place, like banning funding from going toward for-profit organizations and new provisions cracking down on corruption.
One of the reasons Pelosi reinstituted earmarks? To make the appropriations process run smoother.
“One of the theories behind bringing back earmarks was that it would create more broad-based support for actually passing appropriations bills,” EJ Fagan, a University of Illinois professor who studies the legislative process, told NOTUS.
“That’s what’s on the line, right? If they decide that they don’t want to pass an appropriations process, then they know that they won’t get earmarks,” Fagan said.
Simpson, a long-time appropriator himself, said the idea of banning earmarks was proposed in the rules package at the start of the 119th Congress in January. The provision was decisively rejected, he said.
But with Congress seemingly unable to reach a broader agreement on spending, Republicans are settling for a pseudo-CR that runs for six-and-a-half months. At least, that’s the plan at the moment.
The Senate hasn’t approved of the GOP’s funding bill, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday there aren’t enough Democratic votes for cloture on the legislation.
While lawmakers are still sorting it out, Republicans don’t seem to think the standoff will end with a totally new deal where earmarks miraculously come back. Instead, Republicans said they’d hold out hope for the 2026 fiscal year appropriations process.
“Most members would like to go back to a system, and would assume we will in ’26, where they would be a normal part of the process,” Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said of earmarks.
“Well, I hope it works,” Cole said with a laugh. “I can’t promise you up front that it will.”
“I think everybody will look back on this and say, ‘Boy, this isn’t a good way to do business,’” Cole said. “A lot of members will look back and say, ‘I lost a lot of projects that I could have had if we just had a normal process.’”
Cole himself was set to secure $144 million in earmarks, primarily for regional airports and for major interstate improvements.
Rep. Robert Aderholt, another senior member of the Appropriations Committee, said he’s already been in touch with elected officials in his district about the lack of funding, and his goal is to carry over as many of the requests as possible into the next fiscal year.
But, he said, the year lost is a major challenge.
“I have a big rural area, and a lot of these smaller counties and cities really don’t have the money for highway development, sometimes not even money for sewer projects or water,” Aderholt said.
Aderholt pointed to funding he brought to his district a few years ago to build a water system by the highway. It’s now a booming area for economic development, he said, and it wouldn’t have happened without the water access.
“With things like that, the county didn’t really have the money to do it,” Aderholt told NOTUS.
Rep. Chris Smith said he and his staff spent months winnowing down requests to the final 15 requests he put forward this year. He met repeatedly with project stakeholders and with all the Appropriations subcommittee chairs to ensure his requests would meet needs that otherwise wouldn’t be met.
The $44 million in projects included continuing services at a local domestic violence shelter and a new water system to treat contaminated wells that were serving senior citizens.
“That’s what this job is all about. It’s writing laws, hopefully good policy, but it’s also knowing what your constituents need and working every day of the week for it,” Smith told NOTUS.
“It’s just disappointing,” he said.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Reese Gorman, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.