Understanding the U.S. Congressional Budget Process and Earmarks Explained

what we're going to do in this video is focus on the budget process in the u.s congress and just as a reminder that's

one of the major functions of the united states congress is to pass a budget for the executive branch to decide how much

money the executive branch has to use to actually function and when it comes to the budget the two

most powerful committees are the appropriations committees in the house of representatives and in the senate

they get to decide how much money goes to various departments and programs in the federal government

just for context let's get a broad view of what the federal budget looks like and how it has changed over time

so over here you see the trend from the early 80s all the way until projected a few years into the future at the time of

this video being created and you can see the absolute level of the federal budget has gone from a little under 1 trillion

and it is now approaching 4 trillion and this view of the breakdown of the various spending areas gives us a better

sense of some trends as we mentioned in other videos there's a significant chunk of mandatory spending mandatory spending

or things that by law we have already obligated ourselves to and the big ones here are social

security and medicare and you can see that they have gone collectively from a little over 20 percent of the federal

budget to now approaching almost two-thirds of the federal budget now another chunk of this budget that we are

obligated to pay is the net interest on our national debt we are borrowers as a country and so we need to pay interest

now everything else here you can consider to be discretionary that would be this national defense piece right

here in purple and then everything above this net interest piece and that's what the appropriations committees are going

to decide on where to spend that money how much does national defense get and how much do these other priorities for

the country get now generally speaking the amount of money allocated to various programs and

various departments how it is spent tends to be decided by the executive branch congress's job is to set the

budget but that is not always the case congress can also set aside portions of this budget for specific projects

and the setting aside of parts of the budget for specific projects is known as ear marks

and to make things tangible here are some examples of earmarks from the highway bill that was passed in 2005.

and as you can see it just lists a bunch of special projects and this goes on for tens and sometimes hundreds of pages so

here in california there's a project to construct safe access to streets for bicyclists and pedestrians including

crosswalks sidewalks and traffic calming measures in covina california four hundred thousand dollars if we go down

here to number five renovate and expand national packard museum and adjacent historic packard facilities and that is

almost three million dollars and so one thing that's probably crossing your mind is hey this is a

national highway bill and you have these little projects that seem very very very local and these earmarks here these

set-asides because they feel sometimes wasteful or they're being used more as a political tool versus something that the

federal government should actually worry about sometimes these types of earmarks are referred to as pork barrel projects

pork pork barrel projects and the reason why i

introduced both words are earmarks are just a general thing you can decide whether they're good or bad many of

those earmarks that i listed even though they are for specific projects in specific locations they seemed at least

related to the highway bill but it would be very reasonable for some folks to say why is congress in the business of

funding these specific projects isn't their job to just set the budget to figure out how much the department of

transportation gets and then let them as part of the executive branch decide how to execute on improving the national

highway system or our transportation system and so they would argue that that is pork that those are pork barrel

projects that those are government waste now to get a sense of how significant earmarks and debatably pork barrel have

been in the past we have this chart from citizens against government waste and it shows earmarked

spending from 1991 to 2016. and you will immediately notice some things going from 1991 all the way until

about 2006 you have this steady upward trend in earmarked spending all the way to the peak in 2006 of 29 billion

dollars of ear marks but then something interesting happens in 2011 it looks like it gets pretty close to zero and

then it starts trending up from there but it's much lower than it was before and that's because as we get into this

period after 2006 earmark spending become a very big political issue some of these projects there was famously an

earmark for a bridge to an island in alaska that was going to cost several hundreds of millions of dollars it was

later canceled but it got a lot of press and a lot of politicians started to make it their mission to do away with earmark

spending some of these pork barrel projects were easy to get people worked up about and said hey look this is a

sign of government waste and so in the end of 2010 both the senate and the house of representatives passing

resolutions to end earmark spending although you can see that it still exists in some way at least according to

the citizens against government waste now at first this seems very good because 29 billion dollars on things

like museums or maybe bridges that go to islands that very few people live on does not seem like a good idea it seems

like classic examples of government waste but it's also important to keep it in context remember the federal budget

is approaching four trillion dollars so even in 2006 when the federal budget was a little under three trillion dollars

this was only about one percent of the federal budget and so even though earmarks which often

get called pork barrel projects became a lightning rod for a lot of media attention because they seemed so

wasteful in most years they represent well under one percent of the federal budget and

there are folks who would even argue that earmarks are a good thing by essentially allowing congress people

to set aside an earmark for something in their district it allows it it makes it easier for bills to get passed and it's

only costing us less than one percent to do it it's only something that's streamlining the political process

other arguments they make is these earmarks aren't spending above and beyond the regular budget if they do not

set aside this money for these projects in these various districts or in these various states well then the executive

branch is just going to decide on how to use that money and ideally the executive branch would open these things up for

bid these would be competitive processes but there's examples of the executive branch also favoring certain regions or

certain projects so the budget could arguably be the same whether or not there are those earmarks it's really a

question of whether it is congress that is deciding where these special projects go or whether it is the executive branch

now another term that you might often hear with the legislative process something that helps streamline it is

the term log rolling now log rolling can apply to a lot of things not just in terms of where you

spend money log rolling is just the idea that let's say that i am

congress person a and you are congressperson b and i really like this bill right over here i like

bill number one and you like bill number two and i agree to support you if you agree to support me here i

described log rolling where we support each other's bills but we could even have log rolling where we support each

other's parts of bills for example i'll support your transportation museum in your state if you support my bicycle

path in my state so i'll leave you there the big takeaways here are to appreciate the

size of the federal budget where it gets spent and some of the processes used to help pass that federal budget we also

talked about earmarks which sometimes get called pork barrel projects and it's interesting for you to think about after

this video are they good or are they bad at first especially when you look at the media attention they seem clearly bad

they seem wasteful but when you think about that they're less than one percent of the budget and they might help

streamline the passing of other important legislation maybe making it even more bipartisan who knows some

would argue that they might not be as bad as people first believed you decide