House Republicans Criticized for Changing Earmarks to Favor Rural, Exurban Districts With GOP Officials

House Republican leaders are revamping their approach to earmarks—a legislative tool that enables individual representatives to direct tax dollars to favored projects in their districts—by barring them from four major appropriations bills in the 118th Congress.

Kay Granger (R.Texas) was the House Appropriations Committee Chair, along with 11 GOP members of the subcommittees. new guidance on earmarks (now referred to as “community funding projects” (CPF).

This guidance removes all earmarks that were included in four of the appropriation bills. They cover the Department of Defense and Labor-Health and Human Services-Education as well as the Financial Services and Foreign Affairs sections. These categories are most often represented by Democrats from big-city or suburban areas, while Republican requests for earmarks tend to be for rural and exurban projects.

House GOP’s approach to the new process is very different than the one used by Democrats during the 117th Congress. The rules of Democrats allowed each representative to request up to 10 CFPs. Each request needed to include a written explanation, the amount sought, and the benefits that will be received.

The public was made aware of their requests soon after they were submitted. There were no guarantees that any of the requested would be granted. Brookings Institution analysis Some unexpected outcomes were achieved by the 117th Congress’s earmarks.

“Because earmarks by their very nature spend government money, we might expect Democrats to use the earmarking process more. But that supposition is just partially correct,” The analysis concludes. “On average, in the 117th Congress, Democratic representatives requested two more earmarks than their Republican colleagues at a ratio of about 10-to-8.

“However, just looking at the amount of earmarks requested does not reveal the differences between partisan earmarking behaviour. We can see that Republicans requested $3 million more per individual earmark than Democrats (4.7 million dollars for Republicans, $1.7 million for Democrats). Republicans demanded more than 20 million dollars less from Democrats at the level of individual members.”

The irony of those numbers is that the GOP House majority elected in the 2010 Tea Party Revolution approved a moratorium on all earmarks in 2011. The Senate Republican majority did the same thing, but not until 2015, even though public pressure to do away with earmarks entirely began in 2005, when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) exposed the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska.

The earmark moratorium unofficially went out the window for Republicans in both chambers when Democrats regained the House in 2018, however, and then officially in 2021 when the Republican conference approved lifting it.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is the top Democrat on the appropriations panel in the 118th Congress after serving as the chair in the 117th Congress, issued a statement declaring her disappointment with how Republicans are changing the earmark process.

“DeLauro’s Feb. 28th statement stated that “I’m saddened at the majority’s guidance about Community Project Funding” statement reads. “It’s unfortunate they chose to stop Members of this House from asking for CPFs in their. [excluded categories]. This does not concern Republicans and Democrats. The issue is not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about communities that require federal funding. These subcommittees are being excluded because they limit the opportunities of Members to assist people in their localities and meet immediate needs.

“All the projects included in the final funding packages over the last two years started with demonstrated community need. People on both sides of the aisle agreed that the process we created to govern CPFs last Congress worked … We should be building upon this success and continuing the practices that worked, not decreasing the availability of resources that have benefited our communities.”

First Branch Forecast editor Daniel Schuman said that the Republican-led Appropriations Committee is making it difficult for interested advocates groups and members of the public to get information about what they are requesting.

“The Republicans are requiring members to disclose on their website and on a central website their requests for earmarks, but they’re doing it with a bunch of PDFs, so you can’t follow it instead of doing it with a spreadsheet, which would be useful,” He was referring to digital Portable Document Format. This is a photograph of a document which can be used for reference but complicates analysis of multiple documents.

Schuman however also stated: “It is a step better from before where you had to read the appropriations bills and committee reports to see what made it in there. It is slightly more transparent, but you would have thought that the Republicans, at least if they are interested, at least in theory, in a more transparent and accountable process would have used the more modern technology.”

Schuman pointed out that CPFs in this area are the highest, with the Labor-HHS education being the most popular. It is traditionally dominated Democratically.

“Labor-HHS is one of the biggest appropriations and it’s primarily Democratic requests, so it looks neutral on its face but it’s targeted,” He said.