Originally Posted 10/19/2010:

The FY2011 budget is a mess. Congress has not finished a single spending bill. The House has approved two, the Senate none. A quick peek at Thomas reveals that is unprecedented. Normally, we don’t tabulate earmarks until the bill has passed the floor. But we would be waiting until the final omnibus or whatever comes out of the sausage grinder at the end of the day. So we databased the bills at whatever stage they were in – Subcommittee, full committee, floor. That was 10 bills in the House (no earmarks in either Legislative branch or State, Foreign Operations) and 9 bills in the Senate (no earmarks in either Legislative Branch or State, Foreign Operations plus the Interior bill has not been considered).  Databases available here.

Looking at strictly lawmaker disclosed earmarks: So far, the FY11 House spending bills contained nearly 3,000 earmarks worth $3 billion, while the Senate bills contained more than 3,700 earmarks worth $6.0 billion. Comparing FY10 Senate spending bills with FY11 reveals that earmark spending has gone up 2% year-to-year and the number of earmarks went up 1%. The House comparison is trickier. The House Republican conference adopted a moratorium on earmark requests (only four Republicans didn’t go along). Doing an apples-to-apples comparison with strictly Democrats earmarks in the FY10 and FY11 House bills yields a 6% reduction in earmark costs and a 19% reduction in the number of earmarks. Obviously, the drop becomes more dramatic when you include the Republican earmarks from FY10, then you find a nearly $2.7B drop in amount (46%) and nearly 3,000 fewer earmarks (50%). The average earmark stayed the same in the Senate at $1.6 million, but the House average ticked up to $1.0 million from $880,000. Also, it appears that the 4 House Republicans (particularly Rep. Don Young (R-AK)) who chose to buck the earmark moratorium and request earmarks fared better than they did in past years.

On an individual bill basis, they were all over the map as far as number and dollars. Interestingly, House Agriculture was up in dollars and numbers while Senate Agriculture was down in both. Vice versa, Senate Energy & Water and Homeland Security were up in both while their House companion was down in both. And the rest were everywhere in between.

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Of course we won’t know what the final lay of the land is until the dust settles on FY11 approps. When that will be, who knows.

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See also: Earmarks and Earmarking: Frequently Asked Questions.

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