In March 2024, a $1 million line item died in public.
It was a renovation grant for the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia, requested by Senator John Fetterman. When controversy erupted over the recipient, the item was pulled from the spending package before the bill ever became law. Whatever you think of that particular fight, it was done so publicly. The project had a public sponsor, a public dollar amount, and a public paper trail, and the scrutiny happened before the bill was finalized, not years later stuffed in a report.
Almost nothing else in the federal budget works that way. Which is the case I want to make: earmarks were once the most mocked spending in America, now they have quietly become its most accountable dollars.
The bad old days were real
In 2005, Congressman Duke Cunningham pleaded guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for steering earmarks and contracts to defense contractors. He went to prison. That same year, a $223 million earmark for a bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska to an island with about 50 residents became a national headline. The Bridge to Nowhere drew so much outrage that Congress stripped the earmark designation within months.
By 2011, "earmark" had become a slur, and Congress banned the practice outright.
However, this ban did not stop the spending. The same money kept flowing to the same kinds of projects. What changed is who decided. Instead of elected members putting their names on specific projects, federal agencies made the calls, influenced by whoever could afford the best grant consultants and lobbyists. Members still pushed for hometown projects; they just did it through phone calls and letters that voters never saw. The ban removed the signature, not the spending.
The redesign
When earmarks returned in 2021, they came back wearing a belt AND suspenders. The new rules, documented in the Congressional Research Service's overview, are worth listing because almost nobody knows they exist:
- Every request is posted publicly at the moment it is submitted, well before any committee votes.
- Members must certify in writing that they and their immediate families have no financial interest in the project.
- For-profit companies cannot receive them. Recipients are state/local government entities, schools, and nonprofits.
- The total is capped at no more than 1% of discretionary spending.
- The Government Accountability Office audits a sample of funded projects and reports back to Congress.
Compare that to any other federal grant stream, where the deciding government official sits in a department under an agency you have never heard of.
What the money actually buys
For fiscal year 2026, Congress enacted 8,311 earmarks totaling $15.49 billion. The median project is exactly $1 million.
And the lists are very matter of fact. Belgrade, Maine, Louisa, Kentucky, and Tybee Island, Georgia are each getting a fire station this cycle, replacing buildings from another era that volunteer departments could never bond their way out of. Jewell County, Kansas got $20,000 for its courthouse. A workforce school in Topeka got $1.6 million for equipment. Rome, Georgia's hospital got $1.5 million for new scanners. One of the smallest earmarks in the country is $10,000 to survey a historic African American cemetery in Georgia.
These are the projects too small for any federal agency to notice and too expensive for a small town to fund alone. An earmark is the one tool that lets a community's own representative move it to the front of the line, in writing, under their own name.
Accountability you can watch
The William Way episode was not an outlier. It is what the system is designed to produce: sunlight early enough to matter. Projects get challenged on the floor, quietly withdrawn, or stripped in negotiation every cycle, and it all happens in public documents before enactment.
The transparency now runs even earlier than the spending. More than 440 members posted over 5,800 requests for the current cycle on their official websites before a single vote was taken. You can read exactly what your representative asked for, compare it to what came home, and draw your own conclusions.
Requesting is voluntary, and some members skip the process on principle. North Dakota is currently the only state with zero earmarks, not because it was shut out but because its delegation sat out. Their constituents can see that too, and can decide at the ballot box whether they admire the principle or resent funding everyone else's fire stations.
The honest caveats
Seniority matters: states with senior appropriators do relatively well, and I've published those numbers. And 1% of discretionary spending will never decide the deficit. Earmark reform as a budget fix may be easy to sell, but members love to go back to their districts/states to tell their constituents they were the reason a project got funded.
If you've ever heard of Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, you'd know he was the king of getting money back to his state. During the ban years, as the Senate's top appropriator, he steered federal money toward projects back home, including the FBI's fast growing campus at Redstone Arsenal, and none of it was labeled an earmark. Budget watchdogs call that practice "backdoor earmarking". There were no posted requests, no certification, no name attached. When earmarks officially returned, Shelby showed what the signed version looks like, securing $683 million for Alabama in the first omnibus after the ban was lifted. His total amounted to 6% of the bill's total earmarks!
Then Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy called the earmark return "the restoration of the power of the purse". The Constitution puts spending decisions with Congress, he argued, and Congress had ceded too much of that authority to the executive branch. The ban was supposed to clean up spending. Instead it had moved the decisions somewhere voters could not see them.
The bottom line
The most ridiculed line items in the federal budget are now the only ones where you can see the request, the requester, the recipient, and the amount before Congress votes. That is the new system, and it has proven to be accountable.
Approps is part of that accountability. approps.ai