House Republicans have stuffed government funding bills with more than $4.5 billion worth of narrow projects for their districts. Matt McClain/The Washington Post
Despite their public posture of advocating for lower government spending, House Republicans have billions more at stake in the bills to fund federal agencies than any other voting bloc on Capitol Hill.
Of the four congressional caucuses, House Republicans have stuffed the bills that fund the federal government with more than $4.5 billion worth of narrow projects in their districts, commonly known as earmarks. That’s more than half a billion more dollars than their next closest competitor, the Democratic caucus in the Senate.
Yet, when the first chunk of spending bills hit the House floor in a few days, Republicans expect to struggle to round up votes for a legislative package even though they will include almost all of their earmarks. On Thursday, just 113 Republicans, about 54% of their caucus, voted for a stopgap bill averting a partial government shutdown, while all but two Democrats supported the bill.
Remarkably, it will have to be Democrats who unlock the gusher of federal earmarks into House GOP districts. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is only expected to deliver little more than a third of the vote needed in favor of the overarching legislation that will provide full-year budgets for agencies.
It’s the latest example of what Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in her last two years as speaker, dubbed the “vote no and take the dough” phenomenon among Republicans.
With earmarks once considered the gateway drug to congressional corruption, the tea party-driven House GOP majority banished them in 2011 from funding bills after Justice Department investigations landed several lawmakers in prison and dozens more former staff received felony sentences.
But as the work of the House and Senate Appropriations committees languished year after year, leading to a pair of weeks-long shutdowns last decade, Democrats decided to bring earmarks back when they held the majority, starting with the 2022 fiscal year.
The idea was to instill rank-and-file lawmakers with personal skin in the appropriations game, setting up a detailed process to weed out ethical conflicts and require local support for what is now formally called “community funding projects.”
Requests were initially limited to 10 or fewer, and the overall funds were limited to 1% of the total budgets for federal agencies.
Democrats nearly universally embraced these projects, but House Republicans were reluctant. Barely half of them requested earmarks in 2022, while former congressman Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., then the minority leader and part of the leadership team that banned them a decade earlier, declined these funds.
But after they won the majority in late 2022, House Republicans voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to continue the earmark process exactly as Democrats had re-established it.
According to analyses by CQ Roll Call and Bloomberg Government, about two-thirds of House Republicans stand ready to collect earmarks from the latest work by the Appropriations Committee.
Unlike McCarthy, Johnson fully embraces earmarks, having requested more than $100 million for military bases in the past three years in his district.
Has this transformation helped Republicans learn the ropes and support the overall legislation?
“To some degree,” Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, a veteran member of the spending committee, told reporters Thursday.
As they wrote their own sharply partisan funding outlines last summer, House Republicans had several very close votes, which, without earmarks, might have failed to win a majority.
“It’s hard to vote against a bill when the committee and staff have done everything they can to try to address the issues that you want to address,” Simpson said.
That’s a very old-school view of congressional politics when it was understood that if lawmakers had millions of dollars designated for their individual districts, they were expected to support the overall legislation.
Yet dozens of Republicans will probably thumb their nose at that traditional view in the next few days.
Take Rep. Tim Burchett, who was one of eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy as speaker in early October after McCarthy allowed a stopgap funding bill to pass – mostly with Democratic votes – to avoid a shutdown. He voted no, again, on Thursday on the very brief stopgap bill.
Burchett has warned Americans will “lose our country” over the national debt, but he still submitted roughly two dozen earmark requests worth more than $50 million, ranging from $2.5 million for the East Tennessee Children’s Hospital to $5.4 million to refurbish a Knoxville concert amphitheater to $100,000 to boost genetic testing for state law enforcement.
Members just need to be able to “stand up and defend each and every one of them,” Burchett said. “You know, if we need a hospital, we need a hospital. We need a road? We need a road. And that is a duty of government.”
Does he feel more invested now in voting for either of the two upcoming funding packages, totaling almost $1.7 trillion, since his projects will be included?
“I don’t have any obligation at all,” Burchett said.
Democrats grew irritated last summer as House Republicans steered such a huge amount of earmarked funds in their direction.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, oversaw the relaunch more than two years ago. Back when only half of Republicans requested them, the distribution represented a close to 2-to-1 value for the majority.
“The dollar amount was predicated on the number of requests,” DeLauro told reporters Thursday.
But Republicans took that split and adopted it as precedent for the majority party. They awarded themselves more than 62% of all earmarks, according to The Washington Post’s Jacob Bogage’s analysis in January, easily the largest haul.
Senate Democrats have claimed close to $4 billion in earmarks while Senate Republicans stand to get $3 billion. House Democrats will get more than $2.7 billion.
After about a third of their members declined these projects, House Republicans are dividing up the biggest earmark pie with far fewer lawmakers than their Democratic counterparts.
That results in, according to the CQ Roll Call analysis, a gusher of funds for those House Republicans wanting earmarks.
Of the 100 largest recipients of earmarked dollars in the House, 97 are Republicans.
And House Republicans have looked out for their politically vulnerable members – 10 of the 16 GOP lawmakers representing districts that favored President Biden in 2020 have collected earmark hauls that place them in the top third of the entire House, according to CQ Roll Call.
House Republicans also limited earmark requests to just seven of the 12 annual bills, eliminating projects from some more liberal-leaning measures like the one that funds the Departments of Labor, and Health and Human Services. They also nixed earmarks for the Defense Department, caving to far-right lawmakers who accuse Pentagon leaders of becoming “woke.”
They even blocked three community projects Democrats had won initial approval for because they funded LGBTQ+ projects.
Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., had his $1.8 million request for an LGBTQ+ community center in Philadelphia approved and then blocked, so he instead worked with DeLauro and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the Senate Appropriations chair, along with his state’s Democratic senators, to get $1 million for the project in the Senate bill.
Democrats believe their vetting process has stood up over the past few years and that only political reasons prompted these actions.
“The nature of the projects and reviewing them has been very positive,” DeLauro said.
Some staunch conservatives even regard earmarks as the constitutionally mandated role of Congress, with lawmakers better suited to know their district’s needs than agency bureaucrats.
One such Republican is Rep. Matt Gaetz, another of the eight who voted to oust McCarthy in early October. He initially requested a whopping $141.5 million for a naval air base in his Florida Panhandle district, which would have been one of the largest earmarks in the House this year.
The old-school ethos on Capitol Hill might have led to punishing Gaetz, who led the effort to first block McCarthy’s ascension to speaker in January 2023. Instead, his request was honored, at a reduced rate, for $50 million, which places him among the top 15 recipients in earmark funds.
He, however, regularly votes against the Appropriations Committee’s bills, just as he did on Thursday by voting no on the stopgap bill.
Simpson wishes more Republicans would embrace his panel’s work given that so many have a lot at stake for their districts.
He wonders if many Republicans will vote no in the next few weeks, even as they take the dough in earmarks.
“I don’t know. We’ll see,” he said.
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