The Case Against Earmarks

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, Citizens Against Government Waste has released its ``2024 Congressional Pig Book,'' documenting the fiscal rot that is taking place with congressional earmarks.

CAGW documents 8,222 congressional earmarks in last year's appropriations bills. That is up more than 11 percent in a single year, costing taxpayers $22.7 billion, the fifth highest amount of earmark spending since CAGW began tracking it in 1991.

I thank Tom Schatz and his staff for continuing to shine the light on one of Congress' most tawdry and wasteful practices, in which individual Congressmen bypass merit-driven competition and instead personally direct spending to pet projects in their own districts or to favored supporters.

CAGW notes that ``Earmarks continue to provide the most benefit to the most powerful legislators. In fiscal year 2024, the 90 members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, making up only 17 percent of the Congress, were responsible for 42.2 percent of the earmarks and 35.2 percent of the money.'' One House Appropriations member grabbed 13 earmarks, costing taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars.

Although all spending bills start in the House, and the voters elected a Republican House for that reason, Democrats received three- quarters of the earmarks, 8,571 to the Republicans 2,931. They are all bad, though.

Since the Magna Carta, it has been a settled principle of good governance that the power to spend money should be separate from the power to appropriate it. That is at the heart of our constitutional separation of powers: The President spends money but cannot appropriate it, and Congress appropriates money but cannot spend it.

Earmarks combine these two powers, and the inevitable result is waste, logrolling, porkbarrel spending, and, ultimately, corruption. It is no coincidence that so many of the congressional scandals involving political corruption or laughably absurd projects are the result of earmarks.

Worthy projects in open competitive bidding don't need earmarks. They rise or fall on their own merits. If there is such a thing as a good earmark, the price to be paid is all of the bad ones, and that is a high price, indeed.

Members can and should advocate for their districts and make the case for projects they deem worthy of the money that Congress has appropriated. The problem with earmarks is blurring these two roles and having individual Members both advocate and decide.

Many say they don't trust this President and his deputies to administer these funds appropriately and evenhandedly, and I share that sentiment. If you don't trust the President to administer the funds that we appropriate, then don't give him the money.

We hear that earmarks simply ensure that local governments get a fair break. No. What they actually do is turn the Federal budget into a grab bag for local pork spending by the most powerful Members of Congress and undermine the central tenet of federalism that local projects should be financed by local communities and Federal spending reserved for the Nation's general welfare.

When a local government proposes an earmark, what is it saying? It is saying the project is so low on its priority list that they don't dare spend their own taxpayers' money. Yet, they are perfectly happy to have taxpayers in other communities foot the bill.

The result is a long list of dubious projects that rob St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul for projects that St. Petersburg doesn't benefit from and that St. Paul doesn't deem worthy enough to spend its own money on.

Finally, it is said that earmarks can grease legislation by buying off the votes of individual Members. Add a few local projects for that Member, and suddenly, a bill he would never vote for on its merits becomes a local imperative, overriding his sound judgment. Explain to me exactly how that is a good thing.

Paying interest on the national debt now exceeds our entire defense spending for the first time in our history, and history warns us that countries that bankrupt themselves aren't around very long. If we are going to avoid the terrible fate of so many nations before ours, we have to end congressional profligacy, and earmarks are the most glaring example of that waste.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Citizens Against Government Waste for continuing to expose the excesses and inequities of earmarks and to hold accountable those politicians from both parties who are responsible.

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