Congress does not like the word earmark. The House calls them Community Project Funding. The Senate calls them Congressionally Directed Spending. But that is what they are: line items a specific member of Congress requested for a specific project back home, written directly into the spending bills. And after a one-year pause, they came back in force in fiscal year 2026.
The size of the haul
The FY2026 appropriations laws carried roughly $15.5 billion in earmarked funding, according to Roll Call's analysis of the enacted bills. Approps has compiled the underlying disclosure tables into a searchable dataset: more than 8,300 individual projects across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five territories, each one linked to the official document its amount comes from. You can browse all of it on the earmarks map, or search by project, city, or member.
A few numbers give the flavor of the year:
- Senator Patty Murray of Washington led the Senate with $484.6 million in earmarked funding, and three other senators (Mitch McConnell, John Kennedy, and Susan Collins) each secured more than $430 million.
- Roughly $2 billion, about an eighth of the total, went to colleges and universities, spread across some 800 campus projects.
- Mid-sized states did well by moving early and coordinating requests. Connecticut's delegation, for example, landed more than $190 million across 175 projects. See Connecticut's page for every one of them.
How the disclosure system works
The modern earmark is a documented one. Members publish their requests while the bills are being written, certify they have no financial interest in the projects, and the Appropriations Committees publish tables listing every funded project when the bills become law. Those committee tables are the primary source for everything on this site. Every record on the map carries the official source for its enacted amount, and nothing appears here on the strength of a press release alone.
FY2027 is already taking shape
The next cycle's earmarks are arriving now. The two FY2027 bills that have passed the House so far, Agriculture-FDA and Military Construction-VA, carry 585 Community Project Funding items worth just over $1 billion combined. These are House-passed, not enacted: the amounts can change in the Senate and in conference, and the site labels them accordingly. The committee publishes a project table for each bill as it passes, and those tables land on the map under the FY2027 toggle the same week.
One quirk of the early FY2027 data is worth knowing: the committee's Agriculture-FDA table lists every funded project but does not yet name the requesting members. Requestor attribution arrives with later disclosure, and the records here will be updated when it does.
Why it matters
Earmarks are the most concrete, most local, and most searchable part of federal appropriations. A $2 million water project in your county is easier to see and easier to verify than a $2 billion program account. If you want to know what the appropriations process actually delivers, start with your state, then follow the bills that fund it on the tracker.