Main content
AP®︎/College US Government and Politics
Course: AP®︎/College US Government and Politics > Unit 2
Lesson 2: Structures, powers, and functions of Congress- How a bill becomes a law
- The House of Representatives in comparison to the Senate
- Senate filibusters, unanimous consent and cloture
- Discretionary and mandatory outlays of the US federal government
- Earmarks, pork barrel projects and logrolling
- Structures, powers, and functions of Congress: lesson overview
- Structures, powers, and functions of Congress: advanced
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Earmarks, pork barrel projects and logrolling
The budget process in the US Congress involves powerful Appropriations Committees deciding federal spending. Mandatory spending, like Social Security and Medicare, takes up a significant portion. Earmarks, or specific project funding, can be controversial, sometimes labeled as pork barrel projects. Logrolling, or mutual support between Congress members, can streamline the legislative process.
Want to join the conversation?
- Any major Pork Barrel example by famous politicians?(3 votes)
- How did earmarks get changed to "pork barrel projects"?(2 votes)
- Earmarks are derogatorily referred to as 'pork barrel projects' by those who are against such projects. This term originated in the years following the Civil War. In those days, a barrel of salt pork was a common larder item in households, and could be used as a measure of the family's financial well-being. The same terminology was applied to projects approved by Congress which included specific funding for districts or states represented by influential members.(2 votes)
- What's the difference between an earmark and pork barrel legislation?(1 vote)
- they are names for the same thing depending on if you view it as positive or not.(2 votes)
- What is earmark spending?(1 vote)
- An earmark is a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] What we're
going to do in this video is focus on the budget
process in the US Congress. And just as a reminder, that's
one of the major functions of the United States
Congress is to pass a budget for the Executive Branch
to decide how much money the Executive Branch has to
use to actually function. And when it comes to the budget, the two most powerful committees are the Appropriations Committees in the House of Representatives
and in the Senate. They get to decide how much money goes to various departments and programs in the federal government. Just for context, let's
get a broad view of what the federal budget looks like and how it has changed over time. So over here you see the
trend from the early 80s all the way until projected
a few years into the future at the time of this video being created. And you can see the absolute
level of the federal budget has gone from a little under $1 trillion and it is now approaching $4 trillion. And this view of the breakdown
of the various spending areas gives us a better sense of some trends. As we mentioned in other videos,
there's a significant chunk of mandatory spending. Mandatory spending are things that by law we have already obligated ourselves to. And the big ones here are
Social Security and Medicare and you can see that they
have gone collectively from a little over 20%
of the federal budget to now approaching almost
2/3 of the federal budget. Now another chunk of this
budget that we are obligated to pay is the net interest
on our national debt. We are borrowers as a country and so we need to pay interest. Now everything else here you can consider to be discretionary. That would be this national defense piece right here in purple and then everything above this net interest piece. And that's what the Appropriations
Committees are going to decide on, where to spend that money. How much does national
defense get and how much do these other priorities
for the country get? Now generally speaking, the
amount of money allocated to various programs and
various departments, how it is spent tends to be
decided by the Executive Branch. Congress's job is to set the budget but that is not always the case. Congress can also set aside
portions of this budget for specific projects. And the setting aside
of parts of the budget for specific projects
is known as earmarks. And to make things tangible,
here are some examples of earmarks from the Highway
Bill that was passed in 2005. And as you can see, it just lists a bunch of special projects and
this goes on for tens and sometimes hundreds of pages. So here in California,
there's a project to construct safe access to streets for
bicyclists and pedestrians including crosswalks, sidewalks, and traffic calming measures in Covena, California, $400,000. If we go down here to number
five, renovate and expand National Packard Museum
and adjacent historic Packard facilities, and
that is almost $3 million. And so one thing that's
probably crossing your mind is hey, this is a national
highway bill and you have these little projects that
seem very, very, very local. And these earmarks here, these set asides, because they feel sometimes
wasteful or they're being used more as a political tool versus something that the federal government
should actually worry about, sometimes these types of
earmarks are referred to as pork barrel projects, pork barrel projects. And the reason why I introduced
both words are earmarks are just a general thing. You can decide whether
they're good or bad. Many of those earmarks that I
listed, even though they are for specific projects
in specific locations, they seemed at least
related to the Highway Bill, but it would be very reasonable
for some folks to say why is Congress in the business of funding these specific projects? Isn't it their job to just set the budget to figure out how much the
Department of Transportation gets and then let them, as
part of the Executive Branch, decide how to execute on improving the national highway system
or our transportation system? And so they would argue that that is pork, that those are pork barrel projects, that those are government waste. Now to get a sense of
how significant earmarks and debatably pork barrel
have been in the past, we have this chart from Citizens
Against Government Waste and it shows earmark
spending from 1991 to 2016. And you will immediately
notice some things. Going from 1991 all the
way until about 2006, you have this steady upward
trend in earmark spending all the way to the peak in 2006 of $29 billion of earmarks. But then something interesting happens. In 2011, it looks like it
gets pretty close to zero and then it starts trending up from there, but it's much lower that it was before and that's because as we get
into this period after 2006, earmark spending became a
very big political issue. Some of these projects,
there was famously an earmark for a bridge to an island
in Alaska that was going to cost several hundreds
of millions of dollars. It was later canceled
but it got a lot of press and a lot of politicians
started to make it their mission to do away with earmark spending. Some of these pork
barrel projects were easy to get people worked up about, and say, hey look, this is
a sign of government waste. And so in the end of 2010, both the Senate and the House of Representatives
passed resolutions to end earmark spending,
although you can see that it still exists in
some way, at least according to the Citizens Against Government Waste. Now at first, this seems
very good because $29 billion on things like museums or maybe
bridges that go to islands that very few people live on does not seem like a good idea. It seems like classic
examples of government waste. But it's also important
to keep it in context. Remember the federal budget
is approach $4 trillion. So even in 2006, when the
federal budget was a little under $3 trillion, this was only about 1% of the federal budget. And so even though earmarks,
which often get called pork barrel projects,
became a lightning rod for a lot of media attention because they seemed so wasteful, in most years, they
represent well under 1% of the federal budget. And there are folks who would
even argue that earmarks are a good thing by essentially
allowing Congresspeople to set aside an earmark for
something in their district. It makes it easier for bills to get passed and it's only costing us
less than 1% to do it, and it's only something
that's streamlining the political process. Other arguments they make is
these earmarks aren't spending above and beyond the regular budget. If they do not set aside
this money for these projects in these various districts
or in these various states, well, then the Executive
Branch is just going to decide on how to use that money. And ideally the Executive
Branch would open these things up for bid, these would
be competitive processes, but there's examples
of the Executive Branch also favoring certain
regions or certain projects. So the budget could arguably be the same whether or not there are those earmarks. It's really a question
of whether it is Congress that is deciding where
these special projects go or whether it is the Executive Branch. Now another term that you might often hear with the legislative process, something that helps streamline it,
is the germ logrolling. Now logrolling can apply
to a lot of things, not just in terms of
where you spend money. Logrolling is just the idea
that let's say that I am Congressperson A and you
are Congressperson B, and I really like this
bill right over here. I like bill number one and
you like bill number two, and I agree to support you,
if you agree to support me. Here I describe logrolling
where we support each others bills but we
could even have logrolling where we support each
others parts of bills. For example, I'll support
your transportation museum in your state, if you support
my bicycle path in my state. So I'll leave you there. The big takeaways here
are to appreciate the size of the federal budget,
where it gets spent, and some of the processes
used to help pass that federal budget. We also talked about earmarks
which sometimes get called pork barrel projects. And it's interesting
for you to think about after this video, are
they good or are they bad? At first, especially when you
look at the media attention, they seem clearly bad, they seem wasteful. But when you think about
that they're less than 1% of the budget, and they might
help streamline the passing of other important legislation,
maybe making it even more bipartisan, who
knows, some would argue that they might not be as
bad as people first believed. You decide.