The Truth About Earmarks

Finally, someone comes out and says it. All this earmark nonsense is just that. Nonsense.

The talk that you can reduce federal spending by eliminating earmarks is flat wrong.

For years, lawyers and analysts have tried and failed to come up with a standard definition for “earmark.” But there is no dispute about one thing: All an earmark does is allocate part of the funds being appropriated.

That means that eliminating an earmark only eliminates the allocation and not the spending. The appropriation, the law that actually provides the funds for the government to spend stays at the original level regardless of whether the earmark stays in place. The only thing that changes is that the decision about how and where to spend the funds shifts from Congress to the executive branch agency that administers the funds.

And that, rather than lower spending, is what the earmark debate really is about.