Earmarks came back, and the conservative argument over pork never ended

Let me tell you about the greatest bridge in American history, the one that was going to connect a town of several thousand people to an island of about fifty. It was going to cost taxpayers more than two hundred million dollars. And it was never built, which makes it the only public works project in memory that succeeded precisely by not existing. It became so famous that it stopped being a bridge and became an adjective.

Folks, that is the story of the earmark: a small thing that turns into a very big symbol. And the argument over whether to ban it has divided conservatives for twenty years, including some of the sharpest minds on the right. I am going to give you both sides, and then I am going to tell you where I come down, and you are free to disagree with me.

What an earmark is, in plain words

Every year Congress passes appropriations bills that fund the government. In the old days, a member of Congress could insert a line into a bill, or into the committee report that accompanied it, directing a specific sum to a specific project, a specific recipient, in a specific place, usually the member's own district. That line is an earmark. The bridge in a member's hometown, the research grant to a favored university, the museum, the harbor dredging, the community center that happens to carry the member's name on the plaque.

The defenders say this is Congress doing its job. The Constitution says Article I, Section 9: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." Congress holds the purse. Why shouldn't the people's representatives decide where the money goes?

The critics say this is not the power of the purse. It is the power of the favor: a way to buy a vote for a bill that nobody would otherwise support, by greasing it with a local gift.

Both of those things are true. That is what makes it an argument.

The bridge that became a joke

The bridge I was describing is the Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska, which linked the town of Ketchikan to Gravina Island, where the town's airport sits, along with very few residents. It was funded by an earmark in the 2005 federal highway bill, at a cost reported in 2005 as about $223 million (later estimates for the project ran higher). The nickname "Bridge to Nowhere" caught on nationwide. The criticism was loud enough that Congress removed the requirement that the money be spent on that bridge, in late 2005, but allowed Alaska to keep the funds for other transportation projects. The bridge was never built.

Notice two things about this story, because both matter later.

First, the outrage worked. A single, absurd, visible project turned into a national joke, and Congress retreated. That is how democracy is supposed to function, and it is worth celebrating.

Second, the money stayed in Alaska. The earmark was removed, the dollars were not. The tax money did not come back to the Treasury; it flowed to the same state under a different label. If you are looking for the root of the conservative disagreement, there it is.

The moratorium and what it did

2011: the ban

After the 2010 elections, the new Republican House majority adopted a moratorium on earmarks, and Senate Republicans voted to adopt the same ban for themselves. President Obama, in his January 2011 State of the Union address, said he would veto any bill that contained earmarks. For about a decade, the practice was formally dead.

The argument for the ban was clear, and I thought it was right at the time. Earmarks are the currency of logrolling. A leader who needs 218 votes for a spending bill, or 60 for a Senate bill, can purchase hesitant votes with a project in the district. Take away the currency, and the leader loses a way to pass a bill that costs a great deal. A conservative who wants smaller government should want the leader to lose that way.

What happened next

Here is where the honest people on the other side raise their hand. Spending did not collapse after the moratorium. The reason is that the earmark was never most of the spending. The share of the federal budget that went to earmarks was small. By the common estimates, at their peak they were a percent or two of discretionary spending, and a much smaller fraction of the whole budget, including the entitlements that dwarf everything else. You could eliminate every earmark in America and not make a dent in a $40 trillion debt.

The other half of their argument is more subtle and, I think, more serious. Money that is no longer directed by the legislature is directed by the executive. Congress, in the ban years, passed the same appropriations but left more room for agencies to decide which grants to fund and where to spend. Instead of a member picking a project, a bureaucrat picks it, with less public notice and no name on the plaque. The Constitution gave the power of the purse to Congress, not to the Department of Transportation. By surrendering the right to name the recipient, the argument goes, conservatives handed more power to the administrative state, which is the opposite of what we wanted.

That is a good argument, and it deserves a straight answer, not a sneer.

The return, and what changed

In 2021, House Democrats, then in the majority, brought earmarks back under a new name: Community Project Funding in the House, and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate. The new system came with rules designed to answer the old scandals. Members must post their requests publicly, and they must certify that they and their spouses have no financial interest in the project. In the House, recipients are limited to state and local governments and nonprofit organizations, with for-profit companies excluded. The House Appropriations Committee capped the share of discretionary spending that could go to these projects at about one percent. Each member's number of requests was limited.

Some Republicans participated, some did not, and the split inside the party was real. Those who participated made the constitutional argument: the money is going to be spent regardless, so the question is only who picks. Those who refused made the other one: the practice, whatever its rules, remains a way to buy votes for spending bills that should fail.

The argument, laid out

I am going to put this the way a debater would, so you can see exactly where the disagreement sits.

One. The total spending in earmarks is small compared to the total budget. Both sides agree.

Two. The power of the purse belongs to Congress under Article I. Both sides agree.

Three. The question is whether, in practice, banning earmarks reduced the spending or only changed who decided it. Here is the split. The pro-ban side says the leaders lost a tool for buying votes, and that moves bills toward more restraint. The anti-ban side says total spending was set by topline numbers anyway, and the ban merely transferred the decisions.

Four. Which is right depends on facts that I do not have and will not pretend to have: whether the number of votes a leader could buy with earmarks was ever the margin of victory on a big spending bill. I know that serious people on both sides have looked and disagreed. If anyone tells you the data settle it, ask to see the data.

Where I come down

I'll take a position, since that is what I am here for.

I think the case against earmarks is stronger on the question that matters most to conservatives, which is the culture of spending. Not the percent of the budget, but what the practice teaches. A Congress that routinely trades a bridge for a vote on an omnibus is a Congress that has learned to vote for bills nobody has read in exchange for favors back home. That is the culture that produces trillion-dollar packages where no one in the room can tell you what is on page 800. The earmark was the sweetener, and sweeteners work.

But I also think the other side is correct about one thing, and conservatives should not pretend otherwise. If we ban the member's project and leave the money in the agency's discretion, we have not won. A good rule would be: if the money is going to be spent, put the decision where the voters can find it and name it. Transparency is the key, and the post-2021 rules, with public posting and certification of no financial stake, are an improvement over the pre-2011 system. They are not a cure. A one-percent earmark is still a vote-buying instrument, and a one-percent earmark that is disclosed is still a vote-buying instrument that the voters can see.

What I would add is this: the real pork is not the earmark. It is the baseline. A program that grows automatically, with no vote, is worth a thousand earmarks. I wrote about that sleight of hand in baseline budgeting, where a smaller increase gets reported as a cut, and it should make anyone angrier than a bridge to an island of fifty. The most expensive spending in Washington has no member's name attached to it, because nobody in Congress votes on it at all.

The humor of it

I have to take a moment here, because the earmark debate has produced some of the funniest government in history. We have been told, with a straight face, that a member of Congress who steers a research grant to a particular university is "bringing home the bacon," a phrase that has been so thoroughly embraced that the Department of Agriculture is now, technically, in the pork business. We have been told that a project is "shovel-ready," meaning someone has found the shovel. And when the bridge proposal drew national scorn, the response from the establishment was not "we are sorry," it was "the money stays in the state." The best defense of the Bridge to Nowhere is that it was a bridge to nowhere with a better label.

I like a politician who can bring a project home. I love it. But I like it better when the project can survive a public vote, in daylight, with the member's name on the front of the bill and a fair fight on the floor. The pork we should fear is the pork that cannot stand to be named.

Why this matters to a family

You may be thinking: it is all a rounding error. Who cares about a bridge? Here is the answer.

The earmark is a window, not the room. The fight over it reveals who decides how your money is spent, and whether you can find that person. In a republic, an official who spends your money should be someone you can identify, in a place you can look, with a vote you can read. If a decision is made by a member, you can write the member. If it is made by an agency, you can write the agency, and good luck.

It also reveals the budget's priorities. For every dollar we argue about on the floor, there are many more in programs on autopilot. The citizen's task is to follow the big money, and the earmark is a good training ground. Use a project in your own state as the case study, find it in the public lists the House and Senate post, and ask whether it would pass a vote on its own. That is a civic habit worth building. For the larger accounting problem, the Read a CBO cost estimate yourself before you believe the headline guide is a good place to start, and the long history of government picking projects is in Solyndra to Amtrak, why government picks losers when it picks winners. The rules that Congress has written and bent to restrain itself are in From Gramm-Rudman to PAYGO, a timeline of fiscal rules that bent, and the constitutional alternative is in a balanced budget amendment, the case for it and the conservative doubts.

The case in brief

1. An earmark is a line in an appropriations bill or its report that directs money to a named project, usually in the sponsoring member's district, and the 2005 Gravina Island bridge, about $223 million for a link to an island of very few residents, made it a national symbol.
2. Conservatives disagree in good faith: banning earmarks (the 2011 moratorium) removed a vote-buying tool, but earmarks were a small slice of spending and the ban may have shifted decisions to agencies, against Article I's grant of the power of the purse to Congress.
3. The return in 2021 as Community Project Funding came with disclosure, no-financial-interest certification, limits on recipients and a roughly one percent cap, which improved transparency without ending the logrolling.
4. The real pork is the automatic growth of programs that no one votes on, which is why baselines matter more than bridges.
5. Whatever the rule, the test is whether the spending can be named, found and defended in daylight.

What you can do: look up the Community Project Funding or Congressionally Directed Spending requests posted by your own House member and senators, pick one, and ask their office why it should be paid for by taxpayers nationwide.