Republicans Say: It’s a Mess!
About six weeks after this commentary ran in 2006, Democrats won the House 233-202 and the Senate 51-49, counting two independents who sided with them. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned the day after the vote. Congress banned earmarks, the spending items the piece blamed for part of the debt, from 2011. They came back in 2021 as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate, now with public request lists, conflict-of-interest certifications and a cap of 1 percent of discretionary spending. As of November 2026, fiscal 2027 earmarks are still undecided under a stopgap that runs to Dec. 11, 2026, and the national debt the author put at $8.5 trillion stood at about $40.55 trillion on Nov. 6, 2026, according to Treasury’s Debt to the Penny data.
The commentary below ran in late September 2006, weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections. At the time, this address was home to PorkBusters, a campaign run by bloggers against congressional earmarks. The author argued that some Republicans were themselves calling their party’s record on the budget, Iraq and the war on terror a mess. The figures and quotes below have been checked against the public record, and corrections appear where the record differs.
Fiscal management: the 2006 numbers
The author added up three emergency costs, compared the total with growth in the national debt, and asked where the rest of the borrowing went. Most of the inputs hold up against official sources. The debt arithmetic was looser.
According to the article, the war on terror had cost $437 billion. from 9/11 through fiscal year 2006. Of that, the article said, the Iraq war had cost $330.4 billion. It put the federal cost of Hurricane Katrina at $130 billion so far, out of an estimated $200 billion expected by 2009, and total federal money for 9/11 recovery at $20 billion.
Adding those together, 437 + 130 + 20, gave the author $587 billion, a little over half a trillion dollars. The article said the national debt was about $5.65 trillion when President George W. Bush took office in 2001 and $8.5 trillion five years later. By the author’s math, the debt had grown by about $3 trillion while these emergencies cost only about $0.58 trillion. That raised the question of where the other $2.43 trillion in deficit spending went.
| Item | How the article’s figure compares | What the record shows |
|---|---|---|
| War on terror total, 9/11 to fiscal 2006 | Matches | Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimate of total war appropriations through fiscal 2006, report RL33110, Sept. 22, 2006 |
| Iraq share | About $11 billion higher than CRS | CRS: about $319 billion, or 73 percent of the total; Afghanistan about $88 billion; enhanced base security about $26 billion |
| Katrina, federal cost to date | High for 2006 | CBO: $94.8 billion in budget authority from five emergency supplementals for Katrina, Rita and Wilma; Brookings: $109 billion allocated as of August 2006; CRS later counted about $120.5 billion for the 2005 hurricanes |
| Katrina, longer-term estimate | A projection, not money appropriated | The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities modeled total-cost scenarios in September 2005 |
| 9/11 recovery | Matches the federal pledge | Federal aid pledged to New York after the attacks |
| Debt, January 2001 | Slightly low | About $5.73 trillion when Bush took office |
| Debt, fall 2006 | Matches | About $8.51 trillion on Sept. 30, 2006 |
Using Treasury’s own numbers, gross debt grew by about $2.78 trillion between January 2001 and September 2006, not $3 trillion. That makes the unexplained remainder about $2.19 trillion rather than $2.43 trillion. Gross debt also counts money the government owes its own trust funds, mainly Social Security, so it grows faster than the deficits people usually talk about. The article did not separate out other big factors from those years, such as the 2001 recession, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit passed in 2003. Republicans and Democrats disagreed sharply about how much each of these mattered.
What Republican senators said about spending
The article quoted two Republican senators to argue that party leaders admitted the problem. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said on Sept. 27, 2006, “The American people are tired of overspending.” On June 14, 2006, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) spoke in favor of a spending-restraint plan from Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). He said it “will bring spending under control in 4, 5, or 6 years, which we must do.”
The author noted that Republicans had run in 2000 and 2004 on national security and fiscal responsibility. He called the request for another four to six years “absolutely ridiculous” after what he counted as $2.43 trillion in borrowing beyond the emergencies. Supporters of the Gregg plan saw it differently. To them, setting legal limits on spending growth was the way to fix the problem, not a delay.
Earmarks and Sen. Coburn’s Amendment 4848
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) offered Amendment 4848 to H.R. 5631, the fiscal 2007 defense appropriations bill, which became law on Sept. 29, 2006. It would have required an analysis of the total cost of defense earmarks and how well each one served the Pentagon’s goals. In the amendment’s text, Coburn called earmarks “partially responsible for emergency supplementals and rising debt.” He added that “the amount earmarked as a percentage of the total in the defense appropriations bill has correspondingly increased from about 1.8 percent in 1994 to approximately 2.4 percent in 2006.”
Coburn’s office counted about 587 defense earmarks worth roughly $4.2 billion in fiscal 1994. By fiscal 2006 there were about 2,847 worth about $9.4 billion. The Senate adopted the amendment by a wide margin. House-Senate negotiators later dropped it from the final bills.
The article defined earmarks as spending projects that members add to bills, often called pork. In the author’s view, most had nothing to do with the purpose of the bill they rode on. He wrote that pork had grown by as much as 600 percent under Republican control but did not name a source for that figure. He also reported a Democratic complaint that too much earmarked money went to Republican-led states. He called that criticism plausible and said Republicans would likely make the same charge if Democrats held the majority.
Pat Toomey and the Club for Growth
Pat Toomey, then president of the Club for Growth, a group that backs fiscal conservatives, warned Republicans about the election. “If they don’t show up in big enough numbers to return a Republican majority, it will be because Republicans in Congress let them down,” he said. Toomey later served as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2023. In the Senate, he joined Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) in pushing to make the earmark ban permanent.
The author agreed that Congress had let those voters down. He urged them not to re-elect incumbents on Nov. 7, 2006. He also argued that the tax cuts of those years would be paid back by the next generation, because national debt moves the cost of today’s taxes and spending onto future taxpayers.
War on terrorism and Iraq
The second half of the article shifted from money to how the wars were being run. It relied on a classified intelligence assessment and on testimony from three retired officers.
The National Intelligence Estimate
The author cited the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), “Trends in Global Terrorism.” President Bush declassified its key judgments on Sept. 26, 2006, after parts of it leaked to the press. The released text said the Iraq conflict had become a “cause célèbre” for jihadists. The author read it as showing that the invasion had increased the terrorist threat. Combined with what he called porous borders, he concluded that the country was less safe than before the invasion. The White House argued that the leaked excerpts gave an incomplete picture. The author also pointed to troop increases in Afghanistan against a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda as evidence that the war on terror was going worse than campaigning Republicans claimed.
The Sept. 25, 2006 oversight hearing
On Monday, Sept. 25, 2006, the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held an oversight hearing on how the Iraq war was planned and run. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) chaired it. The three witnesses were retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes. The original article also linked Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), a Republican who had turned against the war, to the hearing.
What the witnesses said, as reported in the article:
- John Batiste, described as a lifelong Republican, called Rumsfeld incompetent and said he did not know how to win. Batiste said he retired rather than accept a promotion to a third star, because he did not want to share responsibility for the war’s direction.
- Paul Eaton, who had two sons in the military, said the administration had not developed the strategy and operational planning the war needed and that forces had been short-handed from the start. He put the Army’s shortfall at 60,000 soldiers. In his account, that forced a “whack a mole” approach of pulling troops out of one hot spot to deal with another. He also faulted Congress for weak oversight, said the war was being fought “on the cheap” at a cost in lives, and called for Rumsfeld’s removal.
- Thomas Hammes, who worked on bases for Iraqi forces into 2004, said every phase of the war had been short of equipment and personnel. One of the witnesses, which the author believed was Hammes, said the Department of Veterans Affairs was about $3 billion short of what it needed to care for some 20,000 seriously wounded service members.
The author called the testimony and the NIE together an unequivocal judgment that the war had been mismanaged. Coverage of the hearing also noted that the witnesses’ main fix was more troops, more money and more time in Iraq. Hammes said planners should prepare for a decade or longer. That differed from Democratic proposals to set a timeline for withdrawal.
Public opinion before the 2006 midterms
Polls in September 2006 showed broad unhappiness with Congress. Reporting on a New York Times/CBS News poll that month, the NY Times wrote: “With barely seven weeks until the midterm elections, Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of the Republican-controlled Congress, with substantial majorities saying that they disapprove of the job it is doing and that its members do not deserve re-election.”
The article ended with a call to action. The author said voters had a constitutional duty to remove incumbents who mismanaged the country and its taxes. He cited soldiers killed and wounded and the debt left to children, and closed with: “A vote for an incumbent is a vote for more of the same.”
What happened next
Voters changed control of both chambers in 2006, and the earmark fight the article described went on for two decades.
- November 2006: Democrats won the House 233-202. In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans each won 49 seats, and two independents caucusing with Democrats gave them a 51-seat majority. Rumsfeld resigned on Nov. 8, and Robert Gates replaced him.
- 2007: The new House majority required members to put their names on earmarks. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 set disclosure rules for the Senate. By a CRS count, total war appropriations reached about $610 billion with the May 2007 supplemental.
- 2011: After Republicans won the House in the 2010 elections, both chambers adopted an earmark moratorium that lasted about ten years.
- 2021: House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) brought earmarks back under new names and rules. Members must post their requests online and certify they have no financial interest in them. The House bars money for for-profit recipients, and total earmarks are capped at 1 percent of discretionary spending. The Republican House majority elected in 2022 kept the program.
- Fiscal 2025 and 2026: Fiscal 2025 ended under a full-year stopgap with no earmarks. Earmarks returned in the fiscal 2026 bills: Roll Call counted nearly $15.5 billion in February 2026, and a later Forbes count reached about $15.7 billion. CRS counted 746 earmarks worth $931 million in the enacted Agriculture bill alone.
- Fiscal 2027: A continuing resolution, Division A of P.L. 119-103, funds the government at fiscal 2026 levels through Dec. 11, 2026. The House-passed bills include Community Project Funding, but final earmark decisions will come after the election.
- November 2026: Major news organizations projected that Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3, 2026 midterms, with some races still being counted. The new majorities take over when the 120th Congress meets in January 2027.
About the original author
The original author was a writer and managing editor of
and founder and president of
which he described as an all-volunteer political action association working to restore responsible government. He served in the Army from 1972 to 1975.
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FAQ
Did Republicans lose Congress in the 2006 election?
Yes. In the Nov. 7, 2006 midterms, Democrats won the House 233-202 and took a 51-49 Senate majority with two independents who sided with them. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned the next day.
Are earmarks still banned in Congress?
No. Congress stopped earmarking from 2011 to 2021. Earmarks returned in 2021 as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate. Members must now post each request publicly, certify they have no financial stake, and stay within a cap of 1 percent of discretionary spending.
How much money goes to earmarks now?
Fiscal 2026 bills carried about $15.7 billion in earmarks, according to a Forbes tally of the enacted bills. Fiscal 2025 had none, because the government ran on a full-year stopgap. Fiscal 2027 earmarks are pending while a continuing resolution runs through Dec. 11, 2026.
How big is the national debt compared with 2006?
Total public debt was about $8.51 trillion on Sept. 30, 2006. It was about $40.17 trillion at the end of fiscal 2026 on Sept. 30, 2026, and about $40.55 trillion on Nov. 6, 2026, according to Treasury’s Debt to the Penny data.
Were the article’s war cost figures accurate?
The $437 billion total matched CRS’s September 2006 estimate for all war operations through fiscal 2006. The Iraq share was higher than the roughly $319 billion CRS gave. The article’s Katrina cost also ran ahead of the CBO and Brookings counts from that time.
What was PorkBusters?
PorkBusters was a campaign run by bloggers, launched in September 2005 in response to Hurricane Katrina spending, that pushed Congress to cut and disclose earmarks. It published commentary like this piece in the run-up to the 2006 midterms. The current site at this address is unrelated to that campaign.
Sources
- Congressional Research Service, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 (RL33110, Sept. 22, 2006)
- Congressional Research Service, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Hurricane Katrina Relief (RS22239)
- Congressional Budget Office, Katrina supplemental spending analysis (archived)
- Congressional Research Service, Overview of Continuing Appropriations for FY2027 (R49353), Congress.gov
- Congressional Research Service, Agriculture and Related Agencies: FY2026 Appropriations (R48564), Congress.gov
- Senate Appropriations Committee, Continuing Appropriations Act, 2027 (Division A)
- Senate Democratic Policy Committee, hearing transcript, Sept. 25, 2006 (archived)
- Sen. Tom Coburn, Amendment 4848 summary (Oklahoma State University archive)
About this article
- Fact-checked before publication.
- Published · Updated
