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.
Congress banned earmarks from 2011 and brought them back in 2021. They now run as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate, carried in the annual appropriations bills. As of November 2026, House members may each request up to 20 projects, for-profit recipients are not eligible, and total earmarks…
Hurricane Katrina became a byword for waste in federal disaster aid. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) later estimated that $600 million to $1.4 billion in FEMA’s individual assistance payments through February 2006 were improper or potentially fraudulent. Congress answered with the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. In November 2026, Cameron Hamilton leads FEMA….
In 2005, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) secured $207 million in the federal highway bill for the Prairie Parkway in Kendall County, Illinois. In December 2005, a land trust he partly owned sold 138 acres of farmland more than five miles from the planned route. Hastert’s office put the distance at 5.5 miles. Hastert’s share…
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s Prairie Parkway was never built. The Federal Highway Administration withdrew its approval in August 2012, Illinois moved the remaining federal money to widening Route 47 and US 34, and Hastert left Congress in 2007. His 2016 federal prison sentence came from an unrelated bank-structuring case, not the land deal. Congress…
The Prairie Parkway was never built. Federal approval for the Kendall County, Illinois highway was withdrawn in 2012, and the Illinois Department of Transportation dropped the planned corridor in 2018. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) left Congress in 2007, went to prison in 2016 in an unrelated federal case, and died in October 2026 at 84. Congress…
This 2006 post questioned grants to private nonprofits tucked into Virginia’s state budget. That question still applies, because Article IV, Section 16 of the Virginia Constitution still bars state appropriations to charities the Commonwealth does not own or control, and the attorney general’s office ruled on budget items like these several times between 2011 and…
The $700 million to move the CSX rail line off the Mississippi Gulf Coast never became law. The Senate kept it in its Katrina and Iraq war spending bill in May 2006. Senate leaders then dropped it before the final $94.5 billion bill, H.R. 4939, was signed on June 15, 2006 as Public Law 109-234….
This post comes from spring 2006, when PorkBusters was active. PorkBusters was a campaign run from 2006 to 2010 by bloggers, including Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, against congressional earmarks. The post tracked a Senate fight over earmarks added to a wartime and hurricane-relief spending bill. The quoted material and the campaign’s commentary are kept below…
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) targeted three items in the 2006 hurricane and war emergency spending bill and lost two of the votes. The $700 million Mississippi rail relocation he tried to block was still left out of the final law, H.R. 4939 (Public Law 109-234), which President George W. Bush signed on June 15, 2006….
The $700 million “Railroad to Nowhere” survived a 49-48 Senate vote in April 2006 but never became law. House and Senate negotiators dropped it from the final emergency spending bill, Public Law 109-234, in June 2006. Congress then banned earmarks in 2011 and brought them back in 2021, under the name Community Project Funding in…
