In the final days before the midterms, Republicans in the tightest races are campaigning on the federal money they steered home. That pitch may win votes on Tuesday, but it is a poor way to run a country that borrows nearly $2 trillion a year.
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What happened this week
On Friday, October 30, 2026, Politico published an analysis of the dozen closest congressional races for Republican incumbents. Most of those candidates are highlighting earmarks in their closing campaigns. An earmark is money that a member of Congress writes into a spending bill for a specific project back home, such as a water system, a road or a community center, instead of leaving it to a regular program with open rules.
The reason is easy to see. Voters are unhappy about the war with Iran, high gas prices and tariffs, and the president's approval rating is low. Republican pollster Whit Ayres told Politico: “When the president's job approval is in the 30s, it is helpful for Republican candidates to be able to create some distance from the president. It's challenging to do that without encouraging the president's wrath.” A ribbon-cutting is a safe way to change the subject.
The same day, Bloomberg Government reported that the House's proposed funding bills for this year contain $8.2 billion in earmarks, with 60% going to Republican members. The most vulnerable lawmakers, those in close reelection fights, received more than their colleagues. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and Congress must pass government funding by Friday, December 11, 2026.
How a banned practice came back
Not long ago, earmarks were a symbol of everything voters disliked about Washington. After a run of scandals, Congress stopped them in 2011. That pause lasted 11 years. Earmarks returned for fiscal year 2022 under a new name, “Community Project Funding,” with some new rules. House members may request up to 15 projects each, requests are posted online, for-profit companies cannot receive the money, and members must certify that they and their families have no financial interest.
Those rules are an improvement on the old system, but they have not kept the practice small. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a taxpayer watchdog group that has tracked earmarks since 1991, counted 8,595 earmarks costing $24 billion in the spending bills for fiscal year 2026. That is 5.7% more money than in fiscal year 2024, and the fourth-highest total the group has recorded. Senate earmarks are not limited to 15 per member, and the Senate's top requesters each brought home well over $300 million.
The list is thoroughly bipartisan. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat, led CAGW's 2026 ranking at $484.7 million. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a Republican, was close behind at $483.7 million. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the Republicans now campaigning on her record, secured 159 earmarks worth $431.6 million.
Why this is a bad way to spend money
Picture four ways to spend money. When you spend your own money on yourself, you care about both price and quality. When you spend your own money on someone else, you watch the price. When you spend someone else's money on yourself, you care about quality. When you spend someone else's money on someone else, you have little reason to watch either. An earmark is the purest case of the last kind: taxpayers across the country pay for a project in one district, chosen by one official who gains credit for it.
The project's success is not measured by results. It is measured by the size of the check and the photo at the opening. No price signal tells anyone whether that money would have done more good in a family's budget, a local business or a state program that has to balance its own books. A private company that wasted capital this way would lose customers. A politician who does it often gains votes.
The bigger price: votes for bigger bills
The direct cost of earmarks is not the whole story. Their larger effect is on how members vote. A lawmaker who has secured $50 million for a bridge in a spending bill has a strong personal reason to vote for that bill, whatever else it contains. Earmarks work as a reward for supporting large spending packages that might otherwise struggle to pass.
That matters when the country's finances are this weak. The federal government ran a deficit of $1.993 trillion in fiscal year 2026, which ended on September 30, and the national debt has passed $40 trillion. In that setting, $24 billion in earmarks equals roughly 1.2% of a single year's deficit. The figure is small on its own, but it helps move bills that are many times larger.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah made the link directly on X on Thursday, October 1, 2026: “There are few threats to America more menacing than excessive federal spending. Time to ban earmarks and reset federal spending levels by reference to the money we have rather than the money we wish we had.”
The strongest case for earmarks
Defenders of earmarks make a serious argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. The Constitution gives Congress, not the executive branch, the power of the purse. If members do not decide where some money goes, unelected officials in federal agencies will decide instead. A member of Congress who lives in a district often knows its needs better than an agency office in Washington, and the projects are public, with each member's name attached.
They add that earmarks are a small share of federal spending, so ending them would not balance the budget. That is true, and the transparency rules adopted in 2021 are real.
But the argument proves less than it claims. Congress already controls spending through the laws it writes for every program, and it can tighten those rules whenever it likes. Local knowledge is a strong case for leaving more money and decisions with states, towns and families, not for routing that money through Washington first and then sending part of it back with a politician's name on it. And a practice that is small in dollars but large in its effect on votes is not harmless.
What would work better
Ban earmarks in law, not just in party rules. The 2011 pause depended on party conference rules, which is why it could be dropped quietly a decade later. A ban written into law, or into the standing rules of both chambers, would be harder to undo.
Give every remaining project its own vote. As long as earmarks exist, any member should be able to force a separate up-or-down vote on a project, so it cannot hide inside a bill of more than a trillion dollars. Projects that are truly worth funding should be able to survive that test.
Let the money stay closer to home. Instead of collecting taxes nationally and sending selected projects back, Congress could shrink the grant programs that earmarks draw on and leave that room for lower federal spending and lower taxes. States and towns that value a project could then fund it themselves and answer to their own voters for the choice. The obstacle is not money. It is that members of Congress would have to give up one of their most useful campaign tools.
What Congress should do
Congress returns after the election with a funding deadline on Friday, December 11, 2026, and a debt that keeps climbing. It should strip earmarks from the final spending bills, put a lasting ban into law and stop treating borrowed money as a campaign asset. A representative who wants credit for a project should be willing to ask voters to pay for it directly. Until then, “bringing home the bacon” only means sending the bill to the next generation.
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