Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Congress Needs Earmarks, Even If They're Overrated

They won't magically fix Congress. But they're better than the alternative.

January 9, 2018 at 10:27 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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President Donald Trump is right to urge a revival of the vilified practice of earmarks. Earmarks are good for democracy. But they wouldn't really solve the problem of congressional gridlock as so many argue.

Earmarks gave Congress the ability to direct agencies to spend for specific projects out of annual appropriations bills. They didn't increase overall spending. Instead, they carved out something out of the overall appropriations to an agency instead of having to submit to the regular process that funds most government projects. Earmarks grew rapidly during the Republican Congresses after the 1994 elections, and remained common in the Democratic Congresses from 2007 through 2010.

In 2011, Republicans banned earmarks as "a symbol of a dysfunctional Congress" that wasted too much money on pet projects. But that was a mistake.