Tag: earmarks

Earmarks Are Back: House Republicans “Opened The Bar” For The Spendaholics

Democrats take every opportunity to spend your tax dollars. The GOP was supposed to know better…

Unfortunately, the first thing the GOP did after they took control of the U.S. House – before the new Congress was even sworn in – they held a secret vote on earmarks. Last December, 158 GOP members of Congress voted to include earmarks in the year-end omnibus spending bill.

House Republicans “opened the bar” for the spendaholics.

Those 158 secret-voting members caused $16,012,272,565 of your tax dollars to be spent on 7,509 earmarks.

Not only did those 158 members adopt earmarks, the Republicans spent more of your tax dollars than their Democratic earmarking colleagues.

In the fiscal year 2024 spending bills being debated this fall, the top 63 earmarkers in the U.S. House are Republicans. Eight of the top ten earmarkers in the U.S. Senate are Republicans.

The U.S. House has a bartender at the spendaholics earmark bar – Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas). She chairs the Appropriations Committee that approves every one of those earmarks. When she was elected to Congress in 1997, the federal debt was $5.4 trillion.

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About 4,000 earmarks worth up to $10 billion slipped into $1.5T spending bill

There were about 4,000 earmarks worth between $8-$10 billion slipped inside the $1.5 trillion spending bill Congress passed, according to Republican lawmakers. 

Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun’s office compiled a 367-page document detailing the earmarks that were tucked into the bill that passed on Thursday night less than 48 hours after it was released publicly. 

Among the projects on the list, there were 142 earmarks linked to Senate Majority Leader Schumer, Braun said.

On Twitter, Braun highlighted the earmark requested by New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman totaling $496,000 for “Promoting Health Equity and Affordable Swim Access through Yonkers YMCA Pool Improvements.”

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on social media about winning millions of dollars for community projects in her district, including housing access and workforce development programs. The title of her post was, “Rep. AOC just won millions for community projects in NY-14.”

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