Congressional Earmarking: Requests, Limits, and Disclosure

Congressional earmarks let individual members of Congress direct federal money to specific local projects, skipping the usual competitive grant process. The House calls these requests Community Project Funding (CPF); the Senate calls them Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS).¹ They came back in fiscal year 2022 after a roughly decade-long pause, and they now run under public disclosure rules, spending caps, eligibility limits, and post-award compliance requirements that didn’t exist under the old system. Getting one takes a persuasive local pitch and a member willing to spend a request slot on it; keeping the money once it’s enacted is a separate project of its own.

How to Request an Earmark

The process starts on the constituent side. A local government, tribal entity, or qualifying nonprofit approaches its Representative or Senator with a project idea. Each congressional office runs its own intake, usually with an application packet and an internal deadline that sits well ahead of the Appropriations Committee’s cutoff. Members receive far more pitches than they can submit, so this office-level review is the first real filter.

A complete request package includes a detailed project description, the exact dollar amount, documentation of community support such as letters from local officials or governing body resolutions, and the name of the intended recipient. It also has to include a federal nexus, meaning the specific federal law that authorizes the type of project being proposed.² Without that nexus, the committee won’t consider the request. A worthy project that can’t be tied to an existing federal authorization goes nowhere.

Once a member picks the projects to advance, the requests go to the relevant Appropriations subcommittee through an electronic portal. Each request must target a specific funding account within that subcommittee’s jurisdiction, and not every account is open. For fiscal year 2027, the House accepts CPF requests through eight of its twelve subcommittees; Defense, Financial Services, Legislative Branch, and State and Foreign Operations do not participate.³

Who and What Qualifies

Eligible Recipients

For-profit businesses cannot receive earmark funds in either chamber. Senators must certify that none of the entities in their requests are for-profit.⁴ Eligible recipients are limited to state, local, and tribal government entities and qualifying nonprofits. Funds cannot be passed through to other organizations; the named recipient has to carry out the project directly.

Prohibited Project Types

Across most subcommittees, museums, memorials, and commemorative projects are ineligible for CPF.⁵ Individual subcommittees layer on their own exclusions. The HUD Economic Development Initiative account, for example, excludes swimming pools, water parks, golf courses, healthcare facilities, entertainment venues, and purely research or planning activities. EPA water infrastructure accounts exclude projects solely for flood control or fire suppression. These restrictions shift year to year, so checking the current eligible accounts guidance for the target subcommittee is essential.

Cost-Share and Domestic Sourcing

Some accounts require the recipient to put up matching funds from non-federal sources. Required matches vary and can run 15 to 25 percent or more of project cost. If the match isn’t there, the project won’t move forward even if the earmark is approved.

Infrastructure projects funded through earmarks must also comply with the Build America, Buy America Act, which requires that all iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in the project be produced in the United States.⁶ Waivers exist when domestic materials aren’t available, when compliance would conflict with the public interest, or when domestic sourcing would raise overall project costs by more than 25 percent, but domestic procurement is the default expectation.

Request Limits and Timing

House Limits

House members may submit a maximum of 20 CPF requests per fiscal year, spread across all eligible subcommittees. Many members submit fewer in practice, concentrating their political capital on the strongest applications. For fiscal year 2027, House submission deadlines fell in mid-to-late March 2026, with specific dates varying by subcommittee. Members then had roughly two more weeks to post their requests publicly on their official websites.⁷

Senate Limits

The Senate uses per-subcommittee caps rather than a single overall limit. For fiscal year 2027, they include:

Homeland Security: 10 requests per senator
Financial Services and General Government: 15 requests per senator
Agriculture: 25 requests per senator
Commerce, Justice, and Science: 35 requests per senator
Interior and Environment: 40 requests per senator
Labor, HHS, and Education: 65 requests per senator
Transportation and HUD: 65 requests per senator

A senator submitting to every open subcommittee could theoretically file well over 200 requests, though the committee ultimately funds only a fraction of what comes in.⁸

The Spending Cap

Total earmark spending across both chambers is capped at 1 percent of federal discretionary spending for the fiscal year. The House has sometimes self-imposed a tighter 0.5 percent limit on its own share. With discretionary spending running in the range of $1.7 to $1.9 trillion in recent years, the 1 percent cap puts the total earmark pool at roughly $17 to $19 billion, split across thousands of projects. Every project competes for a thin slice.

The Annual Calendar

Requests follow the appropriations cycle. Member offices collect constituent applications in early spring, submit their picks to the Appropriations Committee by the spring deadline, and subcommittees evaluate and select projects over the summer. Conference negotiations between the House and Senate run in the fall, with final passage ideally before the new fiscal year starts on October 1. In reality, Congress often misses that target, and earmarks frequently ride on omnibus spending bills passed months into the fiscal year.

Transparency and Anti-Corruption Rules

Public Posting of Every Request

Before the Appropriations Committee considers a request, the sponsoring member has to post the details on their official congressional website: the recipient’s name and location, the dollar amount, and a justification explaining the public purpose.⁷ The Appropriations Committees in both chambers also publish a centralized list of all member requests and the final funded projects.

Financial Interest Certification

Every member submitting a request must sign a certification that neither they nor their immediate family has any financial interest in the project or the recipient organization.⁴ These certifications are made public alongside the requests.

Lobbying Restrictions

Federal law prohibits using appropriated funds to pay anyone to lobby Congress or federal agencies in connection with a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement. Recipients of earmark funds must certify that they haven’t made and won’t make any such payments. Violations carry civil penalties of $10,000 to $100,000 per offense, and failing to file the required certification carries the same range.⁹

After the Bill Is Signed

Getting the project into a signed appropriations bill is not the finish line. Recipients have to register in SAM.gov, the federal government’s central contractor and grantee database, and obtain a Unique Entity ID before any money flows. Registration requires detailed organizational information, takes up to ten business days to process, and must be renewed every 365 days.¹⁰ If registration lapses, the agency can’t release funds.

After enactment, the responsible federal agency runs its own intake. Recipients typically submit a formal grant application, execute a grant agreement, and meet whatever programmatic conditions the agency imposes. The earmark guarantees the money is set aside; agency procedures still gate access to it.

Environmental Review

Infrastructure projects trigger federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act and related laws. For HUD-funded CPF projects, the environmental review begins when the recipient receives the agency’s letter of invitation. Until the review is complete, the recipient cannot take any “choice-limiting actions” such as demolition, construction, or even site clearing.¹¹ Starting physical work before environmental clearance can make the project ineligible for funding entirely. Purely planning activities are generally exempt.

How Slowly the Money Actually Moves

The gap between enactment and actual cash disbursement is bigger than most recipients expect. A GAO review found that by the end of fiscal year 2023, agencies had recorded obligations (signed a contract or awarded a grant) for 74 percent of fiscal year 2022 and 2023 earmark projects but had actually disbursed cash toward only 18 percent. Of the $24.4 billion in total earmark funding across those two years, only 7 percent had been paid out.¹² Some projects lost funding altogether because the recipient organization had closed, declined the award, or failed to complete the agency’s application process. Agencies typically have an additional five years after funds expire to finish distributing the money. Plan for a long timeline between the bill signing and the first dollar.

Ongoing Federal Compliance

Earmark recipients are subject to the same federal grant management rules as any other entity receiving federal funds. The OMB’s Uniform Guidance (2 CFR Part 200) governs how the money is spent, what can be charged to the grant, and how it’s tracked. Costs must be necessary and reasonable, documented, and consistent with generally accepted accounting principles. The same cost cannot be charged to multiple federal awards, and direct and indirect costs cannot be mixed inconsistently.¹³

Organizations without a federally negotiated indirect cost rate can charge up to 15 percent of modified total direct costs as a de minimis rate for overhead without documentation.¹⁴ Once elected, the de minimis rate must be used for all federal awards until a formal rate is negotiated.

Any non-federal entity that spends $1,000,000 or more in federal awards during its fiscal year must undergo a Single Audit. The OMB raised this threshold from $750,000 for audit periods beginning on or after October 1, 2024, so the $1,000,000 figure applies to current fiscal years.¹⁵ Below that threshold, the awarding agency can still require additional financial reporting, and the GAO audits a sample of funded earmark projects each year.¹²

What Happens If Appropriations Stall

Earmarks exist only inside appropriations bills. If Congress fails to pass full-year appropriations and funds the government through a continuing resolution instead, earmarks for the current fiscal year are almost certainly dead. Full-year CRs enacted in recent decades have not included funding for new earmarks and have explicitly discontinued earmarks funded in the prior year’s bill. The continuing resolutions for fiscal years 2007, 2011, and 2025 all established that prior-year earmarks would have no effect under the CR, and in some cases reduced account-level funding by the amount previously allocated to earmarks.¹⁶

Every earmark is a bet on Congress finishing its appropriations work. An organization that spends months preparing an application and lining up matching funds can lose the entire effort if the political calendar doesn’t cooperate. There is no rollover; if the earmark dies in a CR, the application process starts over in the next fiscal year.

1
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Tracking the Funds – Community Project Funding and Congressionally Directed Spending
2
U.S. House of Representatives. FY 2027 Community Project Funding Resource Guide
3
House Committee on Appropriations. FY27 CPF Eligible Accounts
4
U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. Reforms and Regulations for Congressionally Directed Spending
5
U.S. House of Representatives. FY 2027 Community Project Funding Resource Guide
6
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Build America, Buy America (BABA) Overview
7
House Committee on Appropriations. FY27 Guidance Overview
8
U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. FY2027 Appropriations Requests General Guidance
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 31 USC 1352 – Limitation on Use of Appropriated Funds to Influence Certain Federal Contracting and Financial Transactions
10
SAM.gov. Entity Registration
11
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Community Project Funding: Environmental Guidance and Scenarios
12
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Tracking the Funds: Agencies Continued Executing FY 2022 and 2023 CPF/CDS Projects
13
eCFR. 2 CFR Part 200 – Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards
14
eCFR. 2 CFR 200.414 – Indirect (F&A) Costs
15
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. Single Audits FAQs
16
Congressional Research Service. Full-Year Continuing Resolutions: Frequently Asked Questions