Hello Local Arts leaders,
Last month (3/19/21), I sent an update summarizing the U.S. House plan to return spending earmarks, or “congressionally directed spending” in the FY 2022 federal appropriations process. State and local governments, and nonprofits, are eligible
recipients.
Below and attached are further information relating to the U.S. Senate plan to follow the same path. I’ve also included a report published today from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on the topic.
The next step for this process, expected within a few weeks, is for the Senate Appropriations
Subcommittees to provide guidance on how they will process these spending requests.
As with the House, any pursuit of an earmark needs to begin with a conversation with your congressional delegation staff. Americans for the Arts government affairs staff will be gathering further details, examples of projects, and working
with our lobbying firm to provide ongoing guidance to our members on this topic.
____________________
Narric W. Rome
Vice President of Government Affairs & Arts Education
Americans for the Arts
1000 Vermont Ave NW 6th Floor
Washington, DC 20005-4940
Main: 202.371.2830 x2060
Direct: 202.712.2060
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CQ NEWS
Apr. 26, 2021
Leahy tees up return of earmarks in Senate spending bills
Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick J. Leahy on Monday
officially announced a return to earmarking, clearing the way for senators to request funding for home-state projects for the first time in a decade.
The Vermont Democrat’s guidelines come two months
after his House counterpart, Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., announced plans for House Democrats to bring earmarks back in that chamber for the upcoming
fiscal 2022 process.
The guardrails and transparency requirements Leahy announced Monday are similar to those in the House. They include capping earmarks to 1 percent of all discretionary spending,
banning earmarks to for-profit entities, requiring senators to post their requests online and having the Government Accountability Office audit some earmarks every year.
Senators, however, will not be subject to a cap on the number of requests they can submit the way their House colleagues are limited to 10 per fiscal year.
House Appropriations subcommittees also have capped which accounts in each spending bill are eligible for earmarking, ranging from three to five per subcommittee. Senate Appropriators
haven't settled on which accounts will be eligible in that chamber, but they expect the list to look different than the House's.
Opponents of lifting the ban say earmarks lead to wasteful spending and corruption. But Leahy and other backers say earmarks have nothing to do with rising deficits, while new
guardrails for their use would avoid the risk of corruption.
During a floor speech announcing the decision to
bring back earmarks, Leahy said lawmakers not only have the constitutional authority to determine where the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, but a deeper understanding of the communities they represent than unelected officials.
“Every member of this chamber has their hands tied. Why? Because we ceded the power of the purse to unelected bureaucrats here in Washington when we instituted a ban on congressionally
directed spending,” Leahy said. “As a result, even though we appropriate the money, we can't even direct a tiny fraction of the tax dollars we collect from our hard-working constituents and send those tax dollars back into their communities. We turn it over
to the executive branch and have no say in it.”
In addition to the new guardrails, senators will also be bound by the transparency mechanisms that went into Senate rules before appropriations earmarks were banned in 2011.
Lawmakers will need to certify in writing that neither they nor their immediate family has any financial interest in any requested project. Any request must include the lawmaker’s
name, the name and location of the entity that would receive funding and the project’s purpose.
The Senate Appropriations Committee must put each earmark selected in an online, public database that includes the requesting senator’s name “as soon as practicable” after the
markup.
The Senate won’t be able to hold a procedural vote known as a motion to proceed or a conference report vote until at least 48 hours after a full list of earmarks included in the
bill has been posted online.
Senators can also raise a point-of-order objection to any conference report that includes an earmark that wasn’t included in the original House or Senate bill.
Leahy’s earmarks announcement on Monday came just five days after Senate Republicans kept their ban on earmarks in internal party rules. But that decision won’t prevent GOP senators
who want to request directed spending from doing so.
Since the GOP ban is nonbinding, Appropriations ranking member Richard
C. Shelby of Alabama and others say they are free to request "congressionally directed spending" without any repercussions.
Several GOP senators, including Missouri’s Roy Blunt, West
Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito and Maine’s Susan
Collins, have all said they plan to request earmarks.