After a ten year hiatus, the US House is restoring earmarks, the member-directed spending requests that were eliminated after a series of corruption scandals. The change — which includes a variety of guardrails to make corruption far more difficult — received bipartisan endorsement in the chamber.
Each member of the House can request ten earmarks, though only a fraction are likely to receive funding in the final cut months from now. But here are the 20 projects the two Democrats in my state, Maine, chose, via the Portland Press Herald. (That’s Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Jared Golden for those who don’t follow our state as closely as all peoples of the world should.)
I wrote earlier on the earmarks process and how Pingree would have an outsized influence, due to her chairmanship of a Appropriations subcommittee.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.