WASHINGTON — 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.”

What’s less commonplace is completely axing all of the funds that went to earmarks in their specific agency accounts.

In this case, GOP leaders cut nearly $11 billion in funding that went to earmarks in the fiscal 2024 spending bills, instead of leaving that money with the agencies to distribute in other ways. That contributed the bulk of the cuts that GOP leaders cited in claiming the law reduced nondefense spending below the previous year.

More than half of that money, over $6 billion, went to programs funded in the fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD bill; the CR also slashed nearly $1.6 billion in Interior-Environment earmarked funds, $1.3 billion in the Labor-HHS-Education bill, $1.1 billion in Commerce-Justice-Science and a smattering of smaller amounts in other bills.

Funding that was spared included $1.6 billion for military construction and $1.5 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects. The measure also didn’t repeat more than $500 million set aside for fiscal 2024 Rural Housing Service earmarks within the Agriculture Department, although that money was provided out of unspent balances that may no longer be available.

Democrats complained that the remaining funds could be used for flexible purposes as the administration saw fit, though Republicans did insert language blocking the Army Corps from deviating from projects that weren’t previously funded or authorized.

Aides to Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., warned in a fact sheet that this will allow the administration to pick which projects it wants to fund, potentially shortchanging blue states and districts.

“This is particularly risky for Democratic cities and states that may have to beg for their priorities to be funded from an administration that has already cut off vast swaths of funding and threatened retaliation if jurisdictions do not abide the administration’s threats,” Murray’s staff wrote.

Housing, highways, health clinics

Some of the major cuts to earmarked accounts in the fiscal 2025 stopgap law:

•A $3.3 billion reduction to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Fund, which finances thousands of local economic development projects; a 49% cut below fiscal 2024.

•Roughly $2.4 billion in cuts to discretionary highway infrastructure and airport improvement grants, which are funded on top of mandatory spending from prior surface transportation and aviation authorization laws.

•A $1.4 billion reduction to EPA state and tribal assistance grants for clean water and drinking water infrastructure upgrades, a roughly 32% cut.

•$891 million was cut from construction, renovation and technology-related grants to health clinics around the country, or 10% of total appropriations for the Health Resources and Services Administration.

House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called attention specifically to money left on the cutting room floor for communications and technology upgrades at local police departments. The fiscal 2024 spending package contained $247 million for what’s known as “COPS Tech” earmarks within the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services program.

“What is very, very interesting is they took the projects and the money out, they could have left the money in,” DeLauro said. “They could have left the money and used it to deal with the COPS program, health issues, and everything else. They decided not to do it.”

Cole defended the cuts, which he said wouldn’t impact the core operations of any of the programs in question.

“If numbers come down because you take out congressional add-ons, that’s not programmatic funding. That’s not actually year-to-year funding. That’s for a specific project and we just don’t normally do those in CRs,” he said. “So some things that look like they’re cuts are just money being backed out for congressional projects that otherwise would have been there.”

Cole added that the reductions helped pay for higher spending in accounts that needed boosts, including $6 billion above fiscal 2024 for defense-related programs as well as more money on the nondefense side, including for immigration enforcement and low-income housing.

Not unprecedented

It’s not the first time lawmakers have done something like this.

Back in early 2007 after Democrats took control of both chambers in the previous November’s midterms, they wrote a full-year CR for all fiscal 2007 spending bills other than for Defense and Homeland Security, which were enacted before the elections.

That CR nixed home-state projects and zeroed out some earmarked accounts, including for agricultural research projects and facilities. The 2007 CR in all cut $11 billion from 125 different programs, steering the funds to “essential national priorities” ranging from military and veterans health care to low-income housing, a fact sheet from Senate Democrats said at the time.

Still, unlike Democrats in 2007, Republicans this year cut nondefense accounts overall, making any move to restore earmarks in next year’s bills look like hefty increases to domestic spending.

Much will depend on what Trump’s new budget request looks like, but the early betting is on substantial proposed cuts to nondefense programs, given the administration’s early moves to downsize the federal government.

House Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said it depends on Trump’s budget, but there will “probably” need to be cuts elsewhere to make up for adding earmarks back.

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David Lerman and Peter Cohn contributed to this report.

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