“It was the perfect storm that brought everything crashing down,” Stephen Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said of the controversies surrounding earmarks in the 2000s.

Congress made a series of reforms to the earmarks process in the latter part of the decade such as requiring lawmakers requesting funding to publicly disclose their name, the name of the would-be recipient, the nature of the project and the amount of money being requested.

“Certainly a good project can be funded by an earmark, but that doesn’t mean all earmarks are good. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” Ellis added.