Congress Plans To Reintroduce Legislative Earmarks, The ‘Gateway Drug Toward Corruption’

Some representatives on the House Appropriations Committee are planning to bring back earmarks to Congress, allowing legislators to designate certain spending back to their districts for specific projects.

Despite the exploitation of earmarking in the past, such as “the bridge to nowhere,” that led to their ban in previous congressional terms, Democrats are moving forward with a plan to reimplement the strategy with new restrictions. According to Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, each representative will be allowed 10 earmark requests. For those requests to be written into legislation, members will have to prove that the projects they have in mind have community support and are in no way tied to a personal “financial interest” of the member. Finally, the members’ total earmarks may not exceed 1 percent of all discretionary spending.

Other limitations include banning for-profit institutions from receiving earmarked funding and prohibiting any projects that members’ relatives might be connected to in any way.