As Congress works to complete FY2026 appropriations, one thing has become overwhelmingly clear: earmarks, now euphemistically labeled “community project funding,” are back in full force after being restored in 2021 following a ten-year ban.
Earmarks reintroduce a process in which federal dollars are steered by political influence rather than merit-based evaluation. This heavy-handed approach to funding decisions weakens fiscal discipline and erodes public trust in the appropriations process.
Short of restoring the ban on pork-barrel projects, it should at least be far easier than it is now to determine how members of Congress are directing scarce taxpayer dollars to favored projects. Unfortunately, transparency is lacking under the new system.
In practice, earmark disclosures are fragmented across inconsistently formatted committee PDFs, making it difficult to identify total requests from members, recipients, and overall funding levels without extensive manual review. National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) wrote about all the hassles involved in this process here.
To help increase transparency, we compiled disparate earmark disclosures into a single, sortable, and shareable spreadsheet.
- The spreadsheet contains different tabs showing the earmarks for each of the different appropriations packages, the total number and cost of all the earmarks, and the tab labled "Earmarks: Unified Table" standardizes the different formattings across the bills to list all of the earmarks in one single table.
This resource allows users to quickly identify requesting members, recipients, agencies, and funding amounts—information that would otherwise require navigating dozens of separate documents. NTUF will update this list as new earmark requests become available.
| Appropriation Bills | # of Earmarks | Amount |
| Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies | 1,479 | $1,766,898,704 |
| Energy and Water Development | 274 | $3,009,493,000 |
| Interior | 1,277 | $1,743,889,899 |
| Financial Services | 173 | $196,889,000 |
| Homeland Security | 203 | $272,671,513 |
| Labor, Health and Human Services and Education | 987 | $1,380,362,000 |
| Transportation, Housing and Urban Development | 3,218 | $5,979,569,601 |
| Total | 7,611 | $14,349,773,717 |
As long as earmarks remain permissible despite their corrupting influence, what taxpayers deserve—and what NTU and NTU Foundation will continue to push for—is real earmark transparency: clear, timely, and accessible disclosure that allows the public to see how member-directed funding is allocated without unnecessary obstacles.
Until Congress adopts a standardized, centralized reporting system, resources like this spreadsheet of the FY 2026 earmarks will help bridge the gap by making existing disclosures usable and user-friendly. Transparency should empower taxpayers, not burden them with a scavenger hunt.