Earmarks explained through real fights over pork, from the Murtha leadership race and Hastert’s Prairie Parkway to Northrop Grumman’s Katrina money. Tom Harkin defends earmarks while Tom Coburn and John McCain pledge to challenge them one by one, with notes on Virginia’s nonprofit earmarks.
The PorkBusters campaign ended around 2010, and in the next year Congress did what the campaign had pushed for. Starting in 2011, House Republicans and Senate appropriators adopted a moratorium on earmarks. The ban was a party and committee rule, not a law, and it ended in 2021. Earmarks came back as Community Project Funding…
Changing who ran Congress did not end earmarks in the 2000s, and the practice outlasted the reformers who went after it. After the 2006 elections, Congress added disclosure rules in 2007. Party leaders then banned earmarks from 2011, and in 2021 they came back as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending…
The one-year earmark moratorium that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) backed in 2008 failed in the Senate, 29 to 71. Congress did stop earmarking in 2011, after Republicans won the House in the 2010 midterms. Earmarks came back in 2021 under new names: Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate….
The four lawmakers on PorkBusters’ first Hall of Shame list in February 2006 had very different careers afterward. Senators Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Ted Stevens (R-AK) both died in 2010, Stevens after leaving the Senate in 2009. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) became Secretary of State, and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) moved from the House to the Senate….
The fiscal 2006 Labor-HHS-Education bill (H.R. 3010) carried earmarks in the House and Senate versions. On November 17, 2005, the House rejected the first conference report 209-224. A revised report passed 215-213 on December 14, and the bill became law on December 30, 2005, as Public Law 109-149. Congress banned earmarks in 2011 and brought…
Congress stopped earmarking in 2011 and brought the practice back in 2021 under new names. House earmarks are now called Community Project Funding, and Senate earmarks are called Congressionally Directed Spending. Lawmakers must post their requests online, certify that they have no financial interest in them, and send the money only to public bodies and…
The letter below asked President George W. Bush to issue an executive order before he signed the fiscal 2008 omnibus. He signed the bill on December 26, 2007 without one. On January 29, 2008 he issued Executive Order 13457, which told agencies to ignore future earmarks that appeared only in committee reports. Congress then banned…
Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) went on to become one of the Senate’s best-known opponents of earmarks. She did not request them, and she co-sponsored bans in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2018. Congress stopped earmarking in 2011. The practice came back for fiscal year 2022 as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in…
The bill described below became law. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (S. 1) passed the House 411-8 on July 31, 2007, and the Senate 83-14 on August 2. President George W. Bush signed it on September 14, 2007, as Public Law 110-81, and it created Senate Rule XLIV, the earmark disclosure…
The 1,776 requests listed below came from House members in 2007 and were aimed at the fiscal 2008 defense spending bill, H.R. 3222. That bill became law on November 13, 2007, as Public Law 110-116. Congress banned earmarks from 2011, then brought them back in 2021 under new names: Community Project Funding in the House…
