According to Gallup, the approval rating of Congress has not topped 30% in over 10 years. President Trump was elected to drain a Washington swamp that voters deeply distrusted and felt was not working for them.
Nothing epitomizes what’s wrong with Washington more than pork barrel spending in the form of congressional earmarks. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, $15.3 billion was spent on earmarks last year. Since 1991, Congress has doled out over 111,000 earmarks worth nearly $360 billion.
The types of projects that are earmarked typically range from wasteful to ridiculous. For example, in 2019, Congress earmarked millions of taxpayer dollars for Pacific Coastal Salmon, aquatic plants, fruit flies, and brown tree snakes. More than a decade ago, infamous earmarks included the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere,” an indoor rainforest in Iowa, a Teapot Museum, and the research of goth culture. Members of Congress such as Reps. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and Bob Ney even served jail terms in connection to corrupt earmarking.
House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, a Democrat from New York, recently lamented, “Unfortunately, there is currently not the necessary bipartisan, bicameral agreement to allow the Appropriations Committee to earmark.” While that is a welcome sign, there is no guarantee that this sentiment will hold. That’s why Rep. Ralph Norman and I are pushing my House colleagues to adopt the Earmark Elimination Act, which simply states that if an earmark is found in a piece of legislation, that clause would be “stricken” from the bill. This move would match the Senate Republican Conference, which permanently banned earmarks last year.
Earmarks are not just wasteful and corruptive. They represent a circumvention of the process that appropriates the taxpayers’ money. A small group of senior legislators gets to choose which projects get to bypass the normal checks and balances of the legislative process and are then secretly placed in large spending bills. This is a key point: If a project is critically necessary to a district, then members should be able to debate that project in the light of day on the merits, not have the item slipped into a bill in the dead of night, out of public view.
Finally, earmarks are used as the grease to help enable Washington’s deepening spending addiction. Often, earmark proponents claim that in the grand scheme, the amount of taxpayer money that is spent on congressional earmarks is small, and that is true. But these folks fail to address the fact that earmarks have been used as a quasilegalized form of bribery to entice members of Congress to approve large spending packages that increase our deficit and explode the national debt. In an era of trillion-dollar deficits and a $23 trillion debt, it is hard to imagine how we will ever be able to wrestle back any sort of fiscal responsibility if Washington’s big spenders are able to use earmarks to keep the spending spigot flowing.
The people of the United States have made their anger at Washington as clear as they possibly can. They want to see an end to business as usual, the system upended, and the swamp drained. The House can either put its collective head in the sand and restore a practice that taxpayers plainly deplore, or we can show the country that we hear them and pass a permanent ban on them once and for all.
Rep. Ted Budd, a Republican, represents North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.
