As Congress works to pass appropriations by January 30 for the remaining thirteen executive branch departments and various independent agencies not included in the budget deal that ended the shutdown, one thing is clear: the bipartisan earmark party is very much in full swing. In analyzing the FY 2026 appropriations bills to be considered in a “minibus,” (a package that bundles together several spending bills together for a single vote) we tallied 2,880 earmarks totaling $5.25 billion. That amounts to thousands of member-directed pet projects slicing through the discretionary budget.
Congress shut down earmarks starting in 2010—when the newly-elected House majority ended the business-as-usual pork barrelling—but the process returned in 2021 under the guise of “member-directed funding.” Although the labels changed, the substance did not: lawmakers still steer federal dollars to narrow projects. Full transparency remains a challenge.
Counting and tallying the FY 2026 earmarks was no easy task. Each appropriations bill includes a separate PDF listing its earmarks, but the layouts are inconsistent and often make it difficult to copy and paste information from each page into a spreadsheet.
S. 2354 – Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026
Earmarks: https://www.congress.gov/119/crpt/srpt44/CRPT-119srpt44.pdf#page=191S. 2431 – Department of Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026
Earmarks: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_interior_cds.pdfS. 2587 – Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026
Earmarks: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_lhhs_cds.pdfS. 2465 – Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026
Earmarks: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_thud_cds.pdfS. 2572 – Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2026
No earmarks: https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/119th-congress/senate-report/52/1?outputFormat=pdf
To build a usable version of the data for analysis, I copied each page of earmarks and used ChatGPT to convert the entries into a clean table—one page at a time—so I could spot-check the data during the process. A list of the earmarks across the 4 appropriations bills is available for download as an Excel spreadsheet here. Some of the earmarks include:
$1,500,000 for better salmon counting methods in Alaska,
$350,000 to refurbish an elephant-shaped building in New Jersey, and
$200,000 for squash courts in Baltimore, Maryland.
Congress technically discloses earmarks, but disclosure is not the same as transparency. If taxpayers want to see how Congress is spending their money, they shouldn’t have to click through a series of PDFs, scroll deep into committee reports, or decipher inconsistent layouts. Yet, that is exactly what anyone trying to review and tally the number and costs of the latest batch of Senate earmarks must do.
Earmarks were banned because of their corrosive influence on policymaking, and their return has done little to change that underlying concern. Short of restoring the ban entirely, lawmakers should at least require real transparency: a standardized format, a single searchable database, and clear version tracking. If Congress insists on bringing earmarks back, the public deserves a far clearer view of how—and where—the money is being spent.