Home-district projects for members of Congress are back, sprinkled across the government-wide $1.5 trillion bill that President Joe Biden signed recently
FILE - A boat heads out from the Flamingo boat ramp May 4, 2020, in Everglades National Park in Florida. Home-district projects for members of Congress are back, sprinkled across the government-wide $1.5 trillion bill President Joe Biden signed recently, including $350 million to help restore Florida’s vast but imperiled Everglades.
“I'm very proud of them,” said Shelby, top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes spending bills. He rebuffed complaints that it was unfair for senior lawmakers to use clout to garner federal spending. That leaves room, for example, for legislators to take credit for bolstering broad national programs they know benefit their states without having the items listed publicly as home district projects, a characterization that can still attract disdain.Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had 203 projects for New York, ranging from $27 million to upgrade Fort Drum's water systems to $44,000 for neighborhood improvements in the city of Geneva, the AP found.
These included $321 million for an environmental cleanup at an old uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, $73 million to refurbish barracks at Fort Campbell and money for nationwide substance abuse, water project and other programs that help the state.Long distributed with little transparency, Congress stopped providing earmarks in 2011 after high-profile abuses soured voters on them.
The magnitude of this year's projects was small compared with 2010, the last time Congress used earmarks. Lawmakers disclosed 11,320 of them worth $32 billion that year, according to the Congressional Research Service, Congress' nonpartisan research agency. Though the numbers aren't exactly comparable due to differing methodologies, earmarks that year consumed nearly 2.5% of federal agency budgets, while this year’s are about half of 1% of the total.
Five GOP senators who opposed the bill received projects worth $386 million, the Taxpayers group’s figures show: John Boozman of Arkansas, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Rounds of South Dakota. Capitol Hill veterans suggested Manchin was treated well because Democrats will need him this year in the evenly divided Senate, including in efforts to revive Biden's prized domestic bill.
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