Throwing Some Sunshine on the $9.6 Billion in Newly Resurrected Federal Earmarks.

This week is Sunshine Week, celebrating efforts to make government programs more transparent.

Coincidentally, the Congress passed a fiscal year 2022 appropriations bill last week with billions of earmarks selected by individual representatives and senators.

There is a veneer of making these “community projects“ more palatable. They can only be made to governments and nonprofits, the amounts are limited, and there are certifications required that family members will not personally benefit from the earmark. Also, the GAO is charged with the responsibility to "randomly" audit these earmarks.  

It’s difficult to find any consolidated list of these earmarks and the lists that are available are all in PDF format so sorting, combining, and calculating isn't possible. 

So as my Sunshine Week contribution I took it upon myself to download 10 individual PDF files and extract the data into worksheets that I have combined into one Excel file HERE. 

It’s possible I made some transcription or duplication errors in 450+ downloaded pages but this is by far the most comprehensive database that I’ve yet seen of the fiscal year 2022 earmarks.

Because the earmarks in the individual appropriations Divisions were not formatted uniformly I’ve not been able to combine them into one single worksheet, so there are individual worksheets for each of the Divisions. (Some worksheets did not even have states identified).

On the US summary page of my workbook I have counted the number of earmarks by Division and the total earmark dollars.

I also did a similar breakout for the State of Oregon summary worksheet; this is formatted landscape, legal sized. Except for Representative Bentz , all  members of the Oregon delegation had earmarks.

Pasted below are those summaries along with my observations.

Oregon

• 156 earmarks totaled $204 million.
• The Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies Division had the greatest total at $61 million and with only 16 earmarks the cost per earmark was $3.8 million.
• 23 HUD earmarks totaled $33 million, with the Transportation agency providing 9 earmarks for another $9 million.

Nationally

• 5,005 earmarks for a total of $9.6 billion.
• The Transportation and HUD Division had the greatest total at 1,492 earmarks for $2.9 Billion
• 1,014 HUD earmarks totaled $1.5 Billion (So, for the US HUD had 20% of all earmarks and 16% of all earmark dollars). 

I'm hopeful that there will be soon an official listing of all of these earmarks and tracking of the progress of the spending of those funds. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.