As Earmarks Return to Congress, Lawmakers Rush to Steer Money Home

WASHINGTON — One hundred million dollars for an airport in Mobile, Ala. Tens of thousands for upgrades to a police station in the tiny town of Milton, W.Va. Hundreds of thousands of dollars sent to Arkansas to deal with feral swine.

Stuffed inside the sprawling $1.5 trillion government spending bill enacted in March was the first batch of earmarks in more than a decade, after Congress resurrected the practice of allowing lawmakers to direct federal funds for specific projects to their states and districts. Republicans and Democrats alike relished the opportunity to get in on the action after years in which they were barred from doing so, packing 4,962 earmarks totaling just over $9 billion in the legislation that President Biden signed into law.

“It’s my last couple of years, so I decided to make the most of it,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Appropriations Committee, who is retiring after more than two decades in Congress. He steered $313 million back to his home state — the fourth-highest total of any lawmaker.

Often derided as pork and regarded as an unseemly and even corrupt practice on Capitol Hill, earmarks are also a tool of consensus-building in Congress, giving lawmakers across the political spectrum a personal interest in cutting deals to fund the government. Their absence, many lawmakers argued, only made that process more difficult, and their return this year appears to have helped grease the skids once again.

“Earmarks can help members feel like they have a stake in the legislative process, in a legislative world where power is really centralized with party leaders,” said Molly E. Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “They need some skin in the game, and earmarks — community project funding, whatever you want to call them — help members feel that efficacy and remind them why they came to Washington.”

The funding went to projects big and small, rural and urban, crustacean and porcine. Police departments across the country were awarded 75 earmarks — totaling nearly $50 million — while lawmakers steered money toward the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, the Eternal Gandhi Museum in Houston and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo., among other cultural institutions.

And then there were the animals. Beyond dealing with feral hogs, there was $569,000 for the removal of derelict lobster pots in Connecticut, $500,000 for horse management in Nevada, $4.2 million for improvements to the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station in Idaho and $1.6 million for equitable growth of the shellfish aquaculture industry in Rhode Island.

A review by The New York Times of the nearly 5,000 earmarks included in this year’s spending law revealed the following:

• Overall, Democrats brought home considerably more money for their states than Republicans, some of whom boycotted the process. Democrats secured more than $5 billion for their states, compared with less than $3.4 billion for Republicans. Just over $600 million of earmarks were bipartisan, secured by lawmakers in both parties.

• The states that received the most…