The Bridge to Nowhere Was Never Built, and Earmarks Came Back Anyway

Folks, I want you to consider the most successful public works project in American history. It cost taxpayers nothing to build, it never carried a single car, and it is still talked about twenty years later. I am talking about a bridge that does not exist.

It was supposed to connect the town of Ketchikan, Alaska, to an island with an airport and a very small number of residents. Its fame outran any real bridge in the country. It turned into a punchline, a campaign talking point and a symbol for everything people hate about how Washington spends money. And then, after all that, Congress quietly brought the underlying practice back. Let me tell you the story, because it is one of those stories where every side is a little bit right and a little bit embarrassed.

The 2005 highway bill

In August 2005, President George W. Bush signed the highway and transit law known as SAFETEA-LU, a name that could only have been invented by an acronym factory working overtime. It authorized several hundred billion dollars for roads, bridges and transit over five years. It was also stuffed with what Washington calls earmarks: line items that direct money to a specific project in a specific place, named by a member of Congress, rather than leaving the choice to a formula or an agency.

Two of those earmarks went to Alaska. One was for a bridge near Anchorage, across Knik Arm. The other was for a bridge to Gravina Island, near Ketchikan. Together the two earmarks ran to hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Gravina bridge alone was projected to cost nearly $400 million in all. The island's main feature was the local airport, which people reached by a short ferry ride. The bridge was proposed to replace the ferry, and press accounts said it would have stood higher than the Brooklyn Bridge.

Now, I have no objection to Alaskans wanting a bridge. Alaskans have been told for generations that Washington owns most of their state and will decide what they may do with it. If the federal government is going to own the scenery, I understand why they want it to pay for the roads. But the way it came out in the coverage was this: a few hundred million dollars for a bridge to an island with a population you could fit in a school auditorium. Whether that was entirely fair to the people of Ketchikan is a question the headline writers did not pause to consider. They had their phrase. "The Bridge to Nowhere" was too good to check.

The vote that failed

The turning point came in the fall of 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the Senate's most dedicated enemy of earmarks, offered an amendment to the transportation spending bill to take the money earmarked for the Alaska bridges and redirect it to rebuilding a damaged bridge in Louisiana. The argument was pointed: with a national disaster in front of them, should Congress really be paying for a bridge to a tiny island?

The amendment lost in the Senate by a lopsided margin: 82 senators voted to leave the Alaska money alone. That was the vote that cemented the phrase in the public mind, because it showed that even in the shadow of a catastrophe, the Senate could not bring itself to touch a colleague's earmark. The reasoning of the members who voted no was not always about the bridge. A senator who lets another senator's project be taken away is a senator who is inviting his own project to be taken away. That is the unwritten rule of the earmark economy, and it is the reason earmarks are hard to dislodge: every member who has one is an enforcer for everyone else's.

What happened next was a face-saving compromise. Congress dropped the explicit naming of the bridge in the law but let Alaska keep the money to spend on transportation projects of its choosing. The state eventually cancelled the Gravina project in 2007, and the bridge was never built. So the bridge died, but the money, as far as the principle goes, had already been spent in the sense that mattered. It had been taken from taxpayers, appropriated and handed to a state. What made the story a story was that the shame of the bridge forced a reckoning with the method.

The case against earmarks

Here is the first conservative position, and it is a strong one.

1. Earmarks are a currency for buying votes. A leader who needs 218 votes for a big spending bill can get them by offering a few members a project at home. The member votes for a bill that he might otherwise oppose, and the taxpayer pays for both the project and the bill.
2. They reward seniority and influence rather than need. Projects flow toward powerful committee members, not toward the places with the greatest need.
3. They breed corruption. The record includes members of Congress who traded earmarks for gifts and campaign help and went to prison for it. Even where no law is broken, the link between a legislator's favors and his donors is a standing temptation.
4. They are a small part of the budget but a big part of the process. The money itself is a small share of federal spending. The damage is the lubrication: they make it easier to pass bigger bills that the country cannot afford.

That is the position of Senator Coburn, of the Republican conference that banned earmarks, and of many people who came to politics in the Tea Party years. It treats the earmark as the gateway drug to spending.

The House moratorium

After the elections of November 2010, the Republican caucus in the House voted to ban earmarks, and the House Republican ban became a feature of the new majority in 2011. President Obama, in his State of the Union address that January, said he would veto any bill that contained earmarks. So for a decade, the practice was formally dead.

Notice what happened. Congress did not stop spending money. The total went on climbing. The earmark ban removed the member's ability to say where a small piece of it would go, and left the decision with executive branch officials. A bridge in a member's district could still be built, but a bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation, who is on nobody's ballot, would decide whether it was. A critic of the ban might say the ban transferred power from the elected branch to the permanent government. Whether that is true is the heart of the second conservative position.

The case for earmarks

Here is the other side, and I think conservatives should hear it with respect.

1. The Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress. Article I, Section 9 says that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." Congress decides how money is spent. When Congress declines to specify, the executive branch decides, and the executive branch is not elected, not close to the people, and not necessarily wiser.
2. A member knows his district. A representative who lives in a town knows whether the bridge is rotting, whether the fire station needs a truck. A formula written in Washington does not.
3. Earmarks are small. Even at the peak, the total was a small fraction of federal spending. Abolishing them did not make a dent in the deficit.
4. Without them, the executive holds the whip. When a member has no projects to offer, the White House and the agency heads become the givers of favors, and members must please them. That is the opposite of the separation of powers the Founders wanted.

That is also a serious conservative position. It was held by members who were no friends of big government, who argued that the real scandal was not that Congress chose projects but that Congress passed trillion-dollar bills without reading them.

The 2021 revival

In 2021, with Democrats in the majority, the House brought earmarks back under a new name, Community Project Funding. The Senate version is called Congressionally Directed Spending. The new regime came with rules intended to answer the worst of the old complaints.

• Disclosure. Members must post every request on their websites, with a description of the project and the reason it serves the community, so that the public can see who asked for what.
• Certification. Each member must certify that neither he nor his spouse has a financial interest in the project.
• Recipients are limited. Funds can go to state and local governments and to nonprofit organizations, and not to for-profit companies. That cut off the favors to private firms that had been the heart of the old scandals.
• A cap. The total of earmarks is limited to a small share of discretionary spending. The House Appropriations Committee publishes the exact current terms of all these rules, and they should be checked there.

Republicans, once they took the House majority in 2023, kept the program in some form. That tells you something: the conservative case for earmarks had more adherents than the loud ban in 2011 suggested, or the incentive to bring home projects proved stronger than the principle.

Where I come down

I promised to argue one side, so here it is.

I think the 2011 ban was right in spirit and wrong in design. And I think the 2021 revival is right in design and wrong in context. Let me explain, with a numbered argument.

1. The power to decide where money goes belongs to Congress. That is Article I, and it is not negotiable. A conservative who wants the Constitution enforced cannot argue that Congress should hand every spending decision to the executive and then complain about an overgrown executive.
2. But the earmark's sin was never the project. It was the trade. The problem was a vote traded for a favor. Disclosure rules, limits on who can receive the money and a hard cap narrow the trade without eliminating Congress's role. They are real improvements.
3. The cap is the whole game. An earmark limited to a small fraction of discretionary spending cannot do much harm by itself. An earmark with no cap becomes a slush fund. Conservatives should insist on the cap, and fight to lower it, before they fight over the existence of the practice.
4. Earmarks must never be the price of passing a bad bill. If a member's project is the reason he voted for a bill he would otherwise oppose, we have the original sin back. The test is simple: would this member vote the same way if the project were stripped out? If the answer is no, the earmark is a bribe, whatever the label says. The member should be asked the question in public.
5. The deficit does not care. Neither the ban nor the revival moved the total in any decisive way. The national debt, which stood at $38.05 trillion in November 2025 and $40.56 trillion in November 2026 according to Treasury, kept rising whichever regime was in place. If you want to fix the fiscal problem, you have to go after the large programs. Earmarks are the small change in the couch. See the national debt clock for the totals.

So the practical conclusion is that conservatives who spend their energy fighting earmarks are fighting the last war, and conservatives who defend earmarks as a pillar of the separation of powers are overselling a modest tool. The better fight is for a hard cap, for real-time disclosure and for a rule that no earmark may be used to win a vote on a bill that exceeds a spending limit.

The longer discussion of that dispute, from another angle, is in earmarks came back, and the conservative argument over pork never ended.

What the coverage left out

One more thing about the story, since I promised a jab at the coverage. The Gravina bridge was a gift to the press in one specific way: it was easy to explain. A bridge to an island with an airport and a handful of residents fits in a headline. The real money in the 2005 highway law was in programs and formulas that nobody could put on a poster, such as the formulas that send money to states according to rules that few people have read. The earmarks were the visible part of an iceberg. Sinking the bridge made everyone feel that the spending had been reformed. It was a bit like confiscating a man's pocket knife while he is carrying a bazooka.

That is a good reason to put earmarks in perspective, and it connects to a larger theme about federal money and the strings attached to it, covered in Block Grants or Categorical Grants, and Why the Strings Matter Most. It also ties to the question of how much Washington spends without a clear vote of Congress, taken up in The CFPB Is Funded Without an Annual Vote of Congress, and That Should Worry Us. Earmarks, at least, come with a name attached to them. That is more than can be said for most spending.

The case in brief

1. The Gravina Island bridge, funded in the 2005 highway bill, became the symbol of pork, and a Senate amendment to redirect its money failed by a wide margin, though the bridge itself was never built.
2. One conservative position holds that earmarks buy votes, reward seniority and breed corruption, which is why House Republicans imposed a moratorium in 2011.
3. The other position holds that Article I gives Congress the power of the purse and that banning earmarks hands spending decisions to unelected executive officials.
4. The 2021 revival added disclosure, a certification of no financial interest, limits on recipients, and a cap on the total, which answer the worst of the old abuses.
5. The right conservative answer is a hard cap and full disclosure, with the rule that no earmark may be the price of a vote, and the real fiscal fight lies in the big programs.

What you can do: look up the earmark requests your own House member and senators posted on their official websites for the latest spending bills, and write to ask why any one of them is worth the money.