Republicans see them as either a chance to grab a piece of the pie for constituents or a nasty “gateway drug” to wasteful government spending. The answer depends on who you ask.

“If the money’s there, we’d rather our state get it than anybody else because it’s going to be spent,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who’s weighing a run for governor, told the Washington Examiner. “But I think you’re going to see less and less of that over the years with DOGE running around.”

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ron Johnson (R-WI), among the more hawkish GOP senators on fiscal matters, both derided earmarks as the “gateway drug” to bloated pork barrel spending.

“That’s why we’re in such deep doo-doo here,” Johnson said.

With a GOP trifecta controlling Congress and the White House, Republicans are in cost-cutting mode that fiscal conservatives say runs counter to spending items like earmarks. But GOP leaders say the mechanism is once again up for use in the fiscal year 2026 budget that starts Oct. 1, despite slashing $16 billion in earmarks from the 2025 budget in a stopgap funding bill signed into law earlier this year.

Compounding the friction among dueling factions of conservatives are negotiations over crafting a so-called budget reconciliation bill to advance President Donald Trump’s economic agenda on taxes, energy, and the border. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is managing friction over the megabill between warring groups within his razor-thin majority, while Senate Republicans draw their own red lines over fiscal discipline and preventing Medicaid cuts.

The official policy of the Senate Republican Conference bans earmarks. In reality, it’s widely ignored because it’s nonbinding, greenlighting members to submit the very funding requests many vehemently oppose.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) is among the anti-earmark senators who vow not to submit any.

“I need to grit my teeth and resist throwing any of my colleagues under the bus,” Lummis told the Washington Examiner. “It’s odd that Senate Republicans have a rule against it, and they just ignore the rule. It seems kind of disingenuous to me. I’m not going to ask for any.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), perhaps the Senate’s most stringent fiscal hawk, held a “March Earmark Madness Tournament” last year to call out the “most egregious” requests he dubbed the “Shameful 16.”

Trump praised earmarks during his first term and is a wildcard who could significantly influence the process now that Republicans control both chambers, should he choose to weigh in. Congress’s use of them in recent decades has varied widely, including former Speakers Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), John Boehner, and Paul Ryan either scaling them back or eliminating them over members facing allegations of political corruption and bribery.

Lawmakers may request funding for non-profits and state and local governments. For-profit companies are ineligible. Members are eventually required to publicly make available on their government office websites the funding requests they submit for the budget. Some lawmakers solicit requests directly from would-be recipients with submission forms on their office websites.

“Earmark” is often viewed in Washington as a dirty word associated with pork barrel spending to fund lawmakers’ pet projects. Formally, they’re known as “community project funding” or “congressionally directed spending.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) preferred the phrase “congressionally designated expenditures.” He defended the process as one that takes control from bureaucrats in Washington over how already allocated federal funds will be used and places it with lawmakers or local entities more in tune with specific community needs.

“It’s not extra money. It’s money that would probably be spent either within the programmatic plan and laid out by a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., as opposed to specifically determined by elected members in their individual states,” Rounds said. “A bureaucrat in Washington may or may not like [an] idea. I think we’re better suited than they are to make those determinations on a project-by-project basis.”

Rounds cited some of his previous earmark requests for things in his state like road projects for Native American reservations, rebuilding damaged bridges, and improving rural water systems.

More than 8,000 earmarks totaling almost $15 billion were ultimately included in the fiscal 2024 budget. Earmark figures, while typically in the billions of dollars, are but a fraction of the nation’s annual spending, that is nearly $7 trillion.

TRUMP’S BUDGET CHIEF SHOWS ‘TOTAL’ COMMITMENT TO SHRINKING GOVERNMENT

Earmarks are capped at 1% of total discretionary spending, which in 2025 represented the $16 billion that Congress stripped from the $1.6 trillion spending plan.

Trump released his 2026 budget request on Friday that represents a blueprint for congressional appropriators as they craft a final version that lawmakers must eventually pass. His proposal calls for $163 billion in non-defense cuts, or about a 22.6% decrease, to multiple federal programs and offered a window into the president’s political priorities for reshaping the federal government.