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

President Joe Biden (C) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (C, L) meet with a bipartisan group of members of Congress, including Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in Washington on April 19, 2021. Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images

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.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas), along with the GOP leaders of that panel’s 11 subcommittees, on Feb. 28 issued new guidance on earmarks, which are now referred to as “community funding projects” (CPF).

The new guidance excludes earmarks from the four appropriation bills covering the Department of Defense, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, Financial Services, and Foreign Affairs categories. Earmarks sought in those categories tend to come most heavily from Democrats representing big-city and suburban districts, while Republican earmark requests are often for projects in rural and exurban districts.

The House GOP’s new approach differs markedly from how Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives during the 117th Congress, conducted the process. Under the Democrats’ rules, each individual representative could request up to 10 CFPs, and each request had to be accompanied by a written explanation of the purpose, amount requested, and benefits to be gained.

Their requests were made public soon after being submitted, and there were no guarantees of how many, if any, of them would be approved. A Brookings Institution analysis of earmarks in the 117th Congress produced some unexpected results.

“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 states. “On average, in the 117th Congress, Democratic representatives requested two more earmarks than their Republican colleagues at a ratio of about 10-to-8.

“But looking at just the number of earmarks requested undersells the partisan differences in earmarking behavior. When we change our unit of analysis to the earmark amount, we see that Republicans asked for $3 million more per earmark than Democrats ($4.7 million for Republicans; $1.7 million for Democrats). At the individual member level, Republicans requested over $20 million more than Democrats.”

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.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, speaks during testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in Washington on Feb. 26, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

“I am saddened by the majority’s guidance on Community Project Funding (CPF),” DeLauro’s Feb. 28 statement reads. “It is unfortunate that they have chosen to prevent Members of the House from requesting CPFs in the [excluded categories]. This is not about Democrats or Republicans. It is about communities that need federal support. By excluding these subcommittees, they are decreasing opportunities for Members to help people in their districts and to meet urgent needs directly.

“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 told The Epoch Times that, in addition to barring four categories of earmarks, the Republican-led appropriations panel is making it more difficult for members of the public and interested advocacy groups to access details on what is requested.

“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 said, referring to the digital Portable Document Format, which is a picture of a document that is useful for reference purposes but makes analyses of data contained on multiple documents more difficult.

However, Schuman also said: “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 also noted that the largest category of CPFs is in the Labor-HHS-Education area, which is traditionally dominated by Democratic requests.

“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.