Bottom Of The Barrel

Earmarks in Appropriation Acts [Congressional Research Service]. Because of the famous bridge to nowhere approved in the "austerity budget" this past January, there's a lot of public interest in the issue of these "earmarked" projects. Department by department, this report documents that for most of them, since 1994, there's been a fairly steady increase in the number of earmarked expenditures, the amount expended on them, and their percentage of the total budget.