Frequently Asked Questions

Earmark Watch is an experiment in distributed research. We provide a space on the Web where users can investigate and evaluate earmarks — the spending provisions requested by individual members of Congress that target taxpayer dollars to specific projects and recipients — in two ways.

First, users associate basic information with each earmark’s recipient: the recipient’s web and physical addresses, whether the recipient has lobbied Congress, and whether its executives have donated to federal election campaigns. Second, users can contribute additional research and commentary on each earmark, helping determine the extent to which members of Congress earmark funds to meet genuinely important local needs.

Earmark Watch is a forum for citizen scrutiny and oversight of the thousands of earmarks inserted into federal spending measures. We aim to provide both quantitative data — a count of earmark recipients that lobby Congress or whose executives donate to congressional campaigns — and a forum for lively debate over what constitutes a worthwhile expenditure of federal funds: which earmarks meet pressing needs, which are political favors, and which are pure pork.

Through earmarks, members of Congress can secure millions of dollars of funding for a recipient — a private company, nonprofit, university, or a state or local government — or for a specific project, such as building a road or purchasing land. Earmarks receive little or no debate from Congress as a whole; they are not subject to competitive bidding or administrative review; and most earmarks are never examined by the press.

Citizen oversight is therefore necessary to ensure members are spending taxpayer dollars responsibly and justifiably. In the past, some members clearly abused earmarks — the most extreme case being former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who exchanged earmarks for bribes.

Yes — but all the reforms did was add a measure of transparency to the earmarking process, and transparency is only the first step toward accountability. Members’ names are now attached to earmarks (they used to be inserted into bills and committee reports anonymously); lists of earmarks and their sponsors appear in the committee reports of bills that include them; and members must sign a letter stating that neither they nor their spouse has a financial interest in the project or its recipient.

However, members still retain tremendous discretion to steer taxpayer dollars to their favored projects.

For the purposes of Earmark Watch, earmarks are the spending provisions in appropriations bills that House Resolution 6 and the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 require House members and Senators, respectively, to disclose. The 2007 Act uses the euphemism “congressionally directed spending,” which it defines as:

a provision or report language included primarily at the request of a Senator providing, authorizing, or recommending a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, credit authority, or other spending authority for a contract, loan, loan guarantee, grant, loan authority, or other expenditure with or to an entity, or targeted to a specific State, locality or Congressional district, other than through a statutory or administrative formula-driven or competitive award process…

Bear in mind there is no single agreed-upon definition. The Office of Management and Budget defines earmarks, in part, as:

funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents Executive Branch merit-based or competitive allocation processes, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to manage critical aspects of the funds allocation process.

Meanwhile, the House Report to the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriation Bill notes the other side:

Earmarking or directed spending of Federal dollars does not begin with Congress. It begins with the Executive Branch. For example, the list included above lists 92 specific land acquisition or construction projects which have been submitted by the Administration. The Administration, in selecting these projects, goes through a process that is the functional equivalent of earmarking.

Currently, the earmarks listed here come from the committee reports describing the provisions of three bills: the House and Senate versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bills, and the House version of the Defense appropriations bill. Taxpayers for Common Sense extracts the earmark disclosures from those bills and enters them into spreadsheets.

Earmarks in the conference reports for the Labor-HHS-Education bills specify recipients, sponsors, and dollar amounts. The House Defense conference report lists sponsors and dollar amounts but not recipients — only the program to be funded. However, the letters that sponsoring House members submit to the Appropriations Committee — declaring that neither they nor their spouse holds a personal financial interest — do name the ultimate recipients. Taxpayers for Common Sense meticulously matched the recipients named in those letters to the programs in the conference report.

We’re working on it. Bear in mind, though, that not all earmarks are alike. Transportation earmarks, for example, specify roads to be built, or list state transportation departments as recipients; investigating them will require asking slightly different questions — very few intersections, after all, hire lobbyists or have their own websites.

One of our goals is to learn more about the organizations receiving earmarks, and what an organization says about itself is a good starting point. Linking the recipient’s site also makes it easier for others to get familiar with the organization — which is likewise why we ask for a short description of each recipient.

For two main reasons. First, to check whether the organization is headquartered in the district of the earmark’s sponsor. Second, because we would like to create — and let others create — maps of earmarks. Having the address makes that possible.

We are looking for the recipient’s main address — its headquarters. Use your best judgment as to which that might be, and feel free to paste the other addresses into the “further research” section at the bottom of the form.

The short answer: we had the data, so we display it — saving researchers a step. The longer answer: House earmark disclosure, like much federal disclosure, is far less than meets the eye. Defense earmarks in the committee report — the official, online list — specify only the projects receiving funds. The actual recipients are named only in the letters members file certifying they hold no financial interest in the beneficiary. Those letters give both the name and the address of each recipient, and Taxpayers for Common Sense went to great lengths to collect them all — so we publish them for you.

Research suggestion: how many of those defense earmark addresses provided by members of Congress match the company’s actual main address?

We would like to distinguish recipients that routinely win contracts or grants through normal executive-branch procedures from those getting federal funds for the first time through an earmark. Some members of Congress defend Defense earmarks, for example, by arguing that the primary beneficiaries are small firms that otherwise couldn’t get business from the Pentagon.

The default year for contract and grant searches on FedSpending.org is 2005 — the most recent full year for which complete data is available.

The 2006 election cycle was the last full cycle with available data, so we include it alongside the current cycle. We also set a $20,000 floor for contributions so that recipients whose one or two employees made $250 donations aren’t swept in. While still a low number — especially for a large organization — $20,000 is a significant contribution: twice the maximum a Political Action Committee can give a campaign in a single election cycle.

Some members of Congress claim earmarking is justified because members are in touch with the needs of their districts and states. Are they genuinely hearing from constituents about unmet local needs — or are earmark recipients hiring lobbyists to tell members which projects need federal funding?

So few earmarks specified multiple recipients — some naming as many as ten — that there was no elegant way to make the interface work with them. Feel free to answer questions on contracts, lobbying, addresses, and websites in the comments section instead.

Absolutely. Transparency only works when citizens make use of the information. Lively debates over individual earmarks can be well worth having — and the more an earmark is commented upon, the closer it moves to the top of the queue for others to see.

We provide suggestions, but use your own judgment. You can enter the amount of federal contracts a company has won through competitive bidding from FedSpending.org, or information on a recipient’s Political Action Committee from OpenSecrets.org.

As you google a recipient, or read campaign-contribution and lobbying reports, you may stumble on details worth noting: a small company whose employees gave tens of thousands of dollars to a single member of Congress and nobody else; a lobbying firm representing dozens of earmark recipients; or, conversely, a member whose earmark recipients never hired lobbyists or donated at all. The purpose of Earmark Watch is to provide the tool, the forum, and the repository for exactly that research.

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