House Republican leaders say earmarks are coming back in the fiscal 2026 spending bills they plan to write starting this spring, after nixing billions of dollars in home-state projects in the final spending package for the current fiscal year that President Donald Trump signed last weekend.
But after giving anti-earmark GOP conservatives a taste of austerity in the continuing resolution, it’ll be hard to go back to the flush times, some stakeholders fear. Not only would thousands of line-item projects with often funny-sounding names be restored, the move would pump up nondefense discretionary spending by billions of dollars above a baseline that was reset lower by the final CR running through Sept. 30.
Stopgap bills never fund the prior year’s earmarks as a general rule. As House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., put it at a Rules Committee hearing on the yearlong stopgap measure: “You know, if you put it in the ’24 bill, in the ’25 bill if you don’t take it out, you’d build like two bridges in the same place. That’s it.”
