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

House Republican leaders are revamping their approach to earmarks—the controversial 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.

Kay Granger (Republican, Texas) was the House Appropriations Committee chair. She was joined by the GOP chairman of each subcommittee. new guidance On earmarks which are now known as “Community Funding Projects” (CPF).

This guidance does not include earmarks in the four appropriations bills that cover the Department of Defense. The majority of earmarks in these categories come from Democrats who represent big-city districts and suburbia, while Republican requests for earmarks are more often for projects located in rural or exurban areas.

This new House GOP approach is markedly different from the way the Democrats conducted this process during the 117th Congress. The Democrats’ rules allowed each representative to request up to 10 CFPs. Each request needed to include a written explanation, the amount sought, and the benefits that will be received.

The public was made aware of their requests soon after they were submitted. There were no guarantees that any of the requested would be granted. Brookings Institution analysis Unexpected results were obtained from the 117th Congress by using earmarks.

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

“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,” Continued the analysis.

These numbers are ironic because the GOP House majority, elected in the 2010 Tea Party Revolution, approved a moratorium for all earmarks in 2011, despite the fact that they were absurd. Although the Senate Republican majority approved the same thing in 2015, it was not before the public pressure began to eliminate earmarks completely. This came after Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., exposed them. “Bridge to Nowhere” Alaska

In 2018, Democrats won the House. However, it was officially lifted in 2021 by the Republican Conference.

Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut is the highest ranking Democrat on the appropriations panels in the 118th Congress. She previously served as the chair for the 117th Congress. DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, released a statement expressing disappointment in the way Republicans have changed the earmark process.

Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee speaks as Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar testifies in Washington, February 26, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

“I am saddened by the majority’s guidance on Community Project Funding (CPF). 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,” DeLauro spoke out in February 28 statement.

“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,” DeLauro continued.

First Branch Forecast editor Daniel Schuman said that the Republican-led appropriation committee is not only preventing four categories from earmarks but is also making it difficult for interested advocacy groups and members of the public to get information about what’s being 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 stated. He spoke of the digital Portable Document Format. This is a photo of a paper that can be used as a reference, but it makes it difficult to analyse data that are contained in multiple documents.

Schuman admitted that even though CPF requests were published in PDF format and not on a spreadsheet, Schuman was aware of this. “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 noted also that CPFs are most common in the Labor-HHS Education area. This is traditionally where Democratic requests dominate. “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 stated.

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