The Earmark Renaissance: How $28 Billion Bought Bipartisanship

Congress restored earmarks in 2021, rebranding them as "Community Project Funding" in the House and "Congressionally Directed Spending" in the Senate. The rebranding was necessary because the word "earmark" had acquired the rhetorical toxicity of a campaign finance scandal. The spending, however, proceeded without interruption. By FY2026, total earmarked spending has reached $28.3 billion across 4,712 individual projects.

WHAT HAPPENED

• FY2026 omnibus appropriations bill included $28.3 billion in earmarks, up from $15.3 billion in FY2022
• 4,712 individual community projects funded across all 50 states and territories
• Average earmark value: $6.0 million (median: $2.1 million)
• 87% of House members and 94% of senators requested at least one earmark
• Largest single earmark: $340 million for a VA medical center in a swing-state district

THE MECHANISM

Earmarks are the lubricant of legislative machinery. The appropriations process requires 218 House votes and 60 Senate votes. Achieving these thresholds on any significant legislation requires purchasing the marginal votes of members whose districts have specific, identifiable needs that can be addressed with specific, identifiable dollars. The earmark is the currency of this transaction. It is not corruption. It is the operating system.

The 2011 earmark ban did not reduce spending. It reduced congressional control over spending by shifting allocation authority to executive branch agencies. Members of Congress who voted to ban earmarks then wrote letters to the agencies requesting the same projects through the back door. The letters were called "lettermarks." The practice was identical. The transparency was worse.

THE FISCAL REALITY

$28.3 billion is 0.4% of the federal budget. This is not nothing, but it is not the source of the deficit. The deficit is produced by entitlement spending ($4.1 trillion), defense spending ($886 billion), and net interest ($940 billion). Earmarks are a rounding error in fiscal terms and a load-bearing wall in legislative terms. Eliminating them saves almost no money and makes it nearly impossible to pass appropriations bills, which is why every earmark ban has been reversed.

POLLERBULL SIGNAL

• What moves odds: Earmarks directly affect House races in competitive districts. A member who delivers a $15 million infrastructure project to a swing district has a tangible accomplishment to campaign on. Our model weights incumbency advantage at 0.20; earmark delivery is a component of that advantage.
• What would falsify this: If a significant number of incumbents lose despite delivering earmarks, the electoral value of targeted spending has declined, which would be genuinely novel in American political history.