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 $700 million “railroad to nowhere” never got built. In May 2006 the Senate kept the money in its Hurricane Katrina emergency bill by a single vote. House and Senate negotiators then dropped it from the final law, the $94.5 billion supplemental that President George W. Bush signed on June 15, 2006 (P.L. 109-234). Congress…
The $700 million to move the CSX rail line off the Mississippi Gulf Coast never became law. House and Senate negotiators dropped it in late May 2006, and on June 15, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the $94.5 billion war and hurricane emergency bill (H.R. 4939, Public Law 109-234) without it. Congress banned earmarks…
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…
The $700 million to move the CSX railroad off the Mississippi Gulf Coast never got spent. The Senate kept it in the 2006 hurricane emergency bill by one vote, and House-Senate negotiators removed it weeks later. President George W. Bush signed the final $94.5 billion bill (P.L. 109-234) on June 15, 2006, without the railroad…
Congress did not ban earmarks in 2006, the year this poll came out. After the November 2006 midterms, the new Democratic majority added disclosure rules in 2007. In 2011, House Republicans and Senate appropriators adopted a moratorium that lasted until Congress resumed earmarks for fiscal 2022. Earmarks came back in 2021 for fiscal year 2022…
The Gulf Coast rail relocation that the bus tour visited in Gulfport was never funded. Congress removed the roughly $700 million from the 2006 war and hurricane supplemental, H.R. 4939, and the CSX line that had been rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina stayed where it was. Earmarks of this kind were banned in Congress from 2011….
The bill described below passed. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590) cleared the Senate by unanimous consent on September 7, 2006, after bloggers helped expose two senators who had put secret holds on it. President George W. Bush signed it on September 26, 2006, as Public Law 109-282. The database it required…
The $700 million plan to move the CSX tracks off the Mississippi Gulf Coast was never funded. Congress dropped it from the 2006 Katrina and war supplemental in conference, the rebuilt line stayed where it was, and since August 18, 2025 that coastal corridor has carried Amtrak’s new Mardi Gras Service between New Orleans and…
The Navy won on the main point. When the 2006 war and hurricane supplemental (H.R. 4939) became law in June 2006, conferees dropped the Senate language that would have made the Navy pay Northrop Grumman up to $500 million for Katrina “business disruption” costs. In its place they set aside at least $140 million for…
A secret 2006 meeting on earmark reform never produced a Senate task force. The changes came later. Congress added earmark disclosure rules in 2007, and earmarks were banned from 2011 until 2021, when they came back as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate. As of November 2026, every…
