Tag Archives: earmarks

Things That Make Me Furious

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We elected President Trump and a Republican Congress to cut government spending. The Department of Government Efficiency showed us much of the wasteful spending. Congress just passed a bunch of spending bills loaded with earmarks. Is Congress listening to the people who elected them?

On Monday, Open The Books reported:

Most universities dream of wealthy alumni who will send massive donations to their alma maters. The kind who contribute millions of dollars year after year, funding libraries, laboratories and more.

A select few universities have found such a wealthy, if unwitting, donor for 2026: the U.S. taxpayer, by way of pork-hungry senators.

Twenty-four senators requested $636 million of earmarks for the universities they attended as students. That’s more than 20% of the $3.7 billion of earmarks requested for universities in the 2026 federal budget, according to Open the Books’ review of congressional disclosures.

The list includes 13 Democrats and 11 Republicans. However, it was Republicans who requested $470 million (74%) of the cash.

The average alma mater earmark request is worth $4.9 million this year. Earmark requests for universities that are not affiliated with a senator were worth only $3 million on average.

This is a partial list:

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville
7 earmark requests worth $164.9 million

Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV)
Marshall University
9 earmark requests worth $57.5 million

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Washington State University
2 earmark requests worth $50.9 million

Sen. John Boozman (R-AR)
University of Arkansas-Fayetteville
2 earmark requests worth $4.3 million

The article concludes:

The government will shut down on Jan. 31 if Congress cannot agree on a 2026 federal budget. Unfortunately for taxpayers, alma mater earmarks appear to be one of the few items that lawmakers from both parties support.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) introduced an amendment on Jan. 22 to strike all earmarks from the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill, calling them “partisan pet projects” that are “outside the core mission” of the bill.

He was unsuccessful. Seventy-six House Republicans joined 215 Democrats in voting to keep the earmarks intact. Another eight Republicans and one Democrat abstained. The results were unsurprising, given that 31 House members secured $131 million for their own alma maters last year.

Each one gets an “F” for fiscal sanity.

This is unacceptable.

This is the link to download the full list of donations to alma maters.

Stopping Corruption At Its Root

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On Thursday, The Gateway Pundit posted an article that provides one example of how the fraud in Minnesota got started and is continuing.

The article reports:

Another Minnesota money pipeline just got shut down, and this one leads straight back to Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The funding, which was tucked into a federal spending bill, was purportedly destined for a “substance abuse clinic” in Omar’s home state of Minnesota.

However, a shocking investigation led by Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) revealed that the “clinic” was anything but legitimate.

During an interview on Fox Business, Senator Ernst detailed the absolute absurdity of the proposal, describing a trail of red flags that would make any honest taxpayer’s blood boil.

“What I uncovered the other day, in one of our spending bills making its way through Congress, was a $1 million earmark from Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

“This earmark was supposedly going to a substance abuse clinic, which actually happened to be housed in a restaurant and run by three individuals who share the same residential address, according to their IRS paperwork. Tons of red flags.

“So this is what we saw with the fraud involving the daycare centers. Now we see other earmarks coming directly from members of Congress where it seems fraud is being perpetrated as well.

It’s very easy to tuck earmarks into thousand-page bills that no one has time to read. It’s time that Congress passed bills that were less than five pages long and were limited to one topic.

The article notes:

As scrutiny intensified over Rep. Ilhan Omar’s role in directing taxpayer funds to questionable Minnesota entities, attention also focused on her family’s abrupt and dramatic rise in wealth.

According to a bombshell report from the New York Post, Rose Lake Capital, founded by Mynett in 2022, scrubbed the details of nine key figures between September and October 2025.

The list included high-profile Democrats like former Obama Ambassador to Bahrain Adam Ereli, ex-Senator and Obama Ambassador to China Max Baucus, DNC Finance Chair associate Alex Hoffman, former DNC treasurer William Derrough, and Keith Mestrich, the ex-CEO of Amalgamated Bank, which he once called “the institutional bank of the Democratic Party.”

None of these individuals has been charged with any fraud. However, the timing coincides with federal prosecutors announcing charges against eight more suspects in the massive Minnesota welfare scam, six of whom are of Somali descent.

Omar, a prominent member of the far-left “Squad,” entered Congress in 2019 with a net worth between negative $25,000 and negative $65,000, burdened by student loans and car debt with no assets to her name.

Ilhan Omar will continue to be elected because of the voter fraud in her district. I think it is time that the Justice Department spent some time with her.

This Might Be Part Of The Problem

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On Tuesday, Breitbart posted an article about the recently passed Continuing Resolution (CR). The article might explain part of the reason we are having so much trouble bringing down the federal deficit.

The article reports:

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) revealed on The Alex Marlow Show that one Republican lawmaker bristled about how the stop-gap spending did not have any earmarks, including his own.

Perry spoked to Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Marlow as the House passed the stop-gap spending bill, otherwise known as a continuing resolution (CR), that freezes government spending for six months.

The Pennsylvania conservative argued that the advancement of the CR is a victory in itself, as it blocked congressional leadership from advancing an omnibus spending bill.

“What’s different and the context about this is that we didn’t get our appropriations done, but our leadership wanted to do an omnibus. They wanted that four corners deal. The CR is not the four corners deal. They don’t want the CR; they’ve been forced into it by people like me and quite honestly, the president,” Perry said.

The former Freedom Caucus chairman also cheered the CR’s lack of earmarks.

“There are no earmarks in this thing,” he said.

I am not a fan of CR’s (although I believe this one is necessary), but I am a fan of no earmarks.

The article concludes:

“I had a Republican member complaining to me at a meeting this morning. He’s grumbling, well I guess I have to vote for this, but you know, my earmarks aren’t it. I’m thinking, you’re talking to the guy, brother,” Perry said.

“I’m not into that,” he said.

The Keystone State conservative also noted that America has not seen a normal congressional appropriations process. He said that the last time Congress went through the “normal” appropriations process was in 1996.

“We have to find a new way to do business,” he argued.

No, you have to go back to the old way of doing business–the “normal” appropriations process.

A Representative Introduces Common Sense

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Yesterday The Daily Signal reported that North Carolina Congressman Ted Budd has introduced an amendment to remove all earmarks from a transportation spending bill slated for a House vote this week.

The article reports:

“Taxpayers across the country are getting their first look at what Washington is like in the new earmark era,” Rep. Ted Budd, R-N.C., said in a statement to The Daily Signal.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” Budd said. “This transportation spending bill includes 1,474 examples of the Washington swamp saying they know best when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars. If an earmarked project is truly worthy of taxpayer funding, then it should be proposed individually on the House floor or as a competitive grant.”

The House is voting on the Invest in America Act, which Budd’s office says includes 1,473 earmarks. Together, those earmarks total $5.66 billion.

I wonder if Washington spending would be so out of control if Congressmen were forced to spend their own money.

The article concludes:

According to Budd’s office, “dozens of these earmarks have to do with Green New Deal priorities like greenways, electric vehicles, etc.”

Conservatives long have opposed earmarks, which direct taxpayer money to lawmakers’ special interests and projects through the budget. Lawmakers banned earmarks under House rules in 2010, but House Democrats voted to bring earmarks back in February.

Earlier this year, Budd and Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., introduced the Earmark Elimination Act, which would permanently ban congressional earmarks.

In March, the North Carolina congressman led a coalition of 10 senators and 25 House members to send a letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committee chairs voicing their “strong opposition to the formal return of pork-barrel earmarks.”

“Every taxpayer dollar is sacred and should be treated that way,” Budd said. “If this Congress really believed that, then we should remove this pork-barrel spending.”

If you haven’t investigated the Cloward-Piven strategy, now is a really good time to do that.

It’s Time To Bring Back The Tea Party

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The Conservative Treehouse is reporting today that the House Republicans have voted to reinstate earmarks. An earmark is defined as a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process. In plain English, it is a bribe inserted in a bill to get the vote of a specific member of Congress. Earmarks are one of the things that are responsible for the bloated federal spending that characterizes Washington. Instead of crafting bills that everyone in Congress can support, Congress resorts to earmarks to buy the votes of their members. Eliminating earmarks was one of the goals of the Tea Party.

The article reports:

When earmarks exist, the crap legislation passes because individual votes can be purchased through the earmark process.  Remember: “The Cornhusker Kickback”; “The Louisiana Purchase”; or “Gator-Aide”; those were legislative earmarks to get Obamacare passed in the Senate.

Obamacare was the sh!t sandwich the American people were forced to eat, the earmarks just gave senators some justification for their votes.

Bottom line.. it is the earmark process that makes crap legislation pass.  Confront any politician and they will admit this.

The most brutally honest answer to the question of earmarks is this: If the legislation sucks and will not pass on its own (hence the need for earmarks), then why would adding some expensive ice-cream make the sh!t sandwich better?

Remember, the originating legislation doesn’t come from inside congress.  The K-Street lobbyists are the ones writing the legislation; the earmark process only arms congressional leadership with an enhanced tool to sell the K-Street construct. {Go Deep}

Every Republican Congressman who voted to bring back earmarks needs to be voted out of office as soon as possible.

Some Good News From The Senate

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On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Senate passed an amendment on Thursday renewing and codifying a Congressional ban on earmarking bills.

The article quotes Senator Ben Sasse who led the initiative to ban earmarks:

“The last thing taxpayers need is for the same politicians who racked up a $22 trillion national debt to go on an earmark binge,” Sasse said in a statement. “It’s pretty simple: Earmarks are a crummy way to govern and they have no business in Congress. Backroom deals, kickbacks, and earmarks feed a culture of constant incumbency and that’s poisonous to healthy self-government. This is an important fight and I’m glad that my Republican colleagues agreed with my rules change to make the earmark ban permanent.”

Earmarks have been banned before, but somehow keep cropping up again. In 2011 the Senate passed a temporary ban on earmarks. In 2017, the Senate voted to keep the ban in place. However, in the past, the ban has not necessarily accomplished much.

The article reports:

The Senate voted in 2017 to keep the ban in place, with a push led by former Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.). Flake launched an investigation in 2015 which found that, despite the 2011 ban, many earmarks had slipped through, with hundreds of millions spent on side projects, such as grape research and subsidies for a ballet theater in the wealthiest congressional district in America.

Similarly, a Citizens Against Government Waste report found that Congress had approved $5.1 billion in earmarks in 2016. In 2016, House Republicans attempted to undo earmark bans, but the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) rebuffed the effort, saying that it would inappropriate right after a “drain the swamp” election.

Earmarks are a tool to get bills passed that might not otherwise be passed. If a Senator is promised a new highway for his state in exchange for his vote, he might vote for whatever is being considered. However, earmarks make it possible to pass bills that are wasteful and would not otherwise pass. Banning earmarks is a really good idea.

The People Who Make Our Laws Can’t Even Follow Their Own Rules

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CBN News is reporting today that despite passing a law last year that made earmarks illegal, Congress passed more than 100 earmarks for 2014.

The article reports:

Every year, the Pig Book Summary blasts Congress for its wasteful pork barrel projects.

“There are 109 earmarks, costing taxpayers $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2014,” Thomas Schatz, with Citizens against Government Waste, told CBN News.

Congress has even passed millions in spending for agencies who didn’t want the money.

One example of an agency that did not want the money is the $90 million for M1 tanks the Pentagon insists it really doesn’t want.

The article further reports:

“The secretary of the Army said they don’t need to build more M1s. They want to delay this for four years and save $3 billion,” Schatz said. “There are 2,000 M1s sitting idle in the desert of California.”

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is getting $866 million to mostly duplicate research on the very same illnesses and diseases as the civilian sector.

“Breast cancer research can be done at the National Institutes of Health and it’s done –billions of dollars [for] other research done at other agencies,” Schatz charged.

Americans are pinching pennies to stay afloat in the so-called economic recovery, and Congress is borrowing money our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. This is ridiculous. It’s time to vote every Congressman out of office who has supported the runaway spending of recent years.

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