Lawmakers in Washington are back to their old tricks to quietly foist more deficit spending on Americans, and it's more irresponsible than ever.

A recent report by Citizens Against Government Waste found that Congress carved out $24 billion in earmarks — or spending set aside for legislators' pet projects, usually in their home states — in the 2026 fiscal year. That's the fourth-highest total since the group first released its annual "Pig Book" in 1991.

The organization also graded all 535 members of Congress based on their voting last year. Forty-two senators and 172 representatives scored zero out of a possible 100 points — for fiscal responsibility.

The findings are a sad indictment of Washington's spending addiction. It's little wonder our country is more than $39 trillion in debt: When lawmakers are more interested in corralling funding for themselves and their districts than balancing the federal checkbook, of course our debt is going to continue to balloon out of control.

To be sure, earmarks are not the largest driver of the national debt, not by a long shot. This year the United States will spend over $1 trillion just on interest to service the federal debt, some 40 times more than the spending lawmakers tacked on for projects that benefit their constituents.

Earmarks, however, are revealing. When a lawmaker sneaks a multimillion-dollar project into a bill at the 11th hour without a vote, the message is clear: The rules don't apply to them. This casual disregard for taxpayers' hard-earned money quickly snowballs into trillion-dollar spending bills that nobody — often not even members of Congress — reads.

Pork is a gateway drug. If lawmakers can't be trusted to have the restraint to say "no" to funding for a project in their backyard, how can they be trusted to have the discipline to get our national debt under control? It's easy to preach fiscal responsibility in a stump speech, but unless leaders have the courage to push back from the federal trough, the government bloat will only get worse.

Politicians, of course, will contort themselves into a pretzel to defend these riders. To hear them tell it, their earmarks are needed to fund projects and programs that are important in their state or district. But if a project is so critical, it should stand up to honest debate and scrutiny through the appropriate budget channels, not be secretly attached in the fine print of a mega bill.

In 2011, Congress banned earmarks, one of the few good things to come out of the Obama years. However, a decade later under former President Joe Biden, Congress revived them under a new, easier-to-swallow moniker: "Community Project Funding." You can put lipstick on a pig — or pork, in this case — but it's still a pig.

Earmarks, while perhaps marginal in the grand scheme, directly contradict the kind of belt-tightening necessary to bring the federal debt to heel. It's NIMBYism in budgetary form, and ultimately it drives more of the same: spending taxpayers cannot afford, government waste and abuse, and a mentality that the rapidly growing debt is someone else's problem.

Evidence continues to point to the severity of Washington's fiscal lackadaisicalness. The Government Accountability Office's "National Fiscal Health" report last month projects the federal debt will exceed 250% of U.S. GDP by 2056 — at which point interest costs alone will equal about 10% of GDP — posing "serious economic, national security, and societal challenges."

While that may seem like a far-off problem, it's not. It's already here. This year, our national debt exceeded our country's entire economic output — the first time it has reached such a level since the end of World War II. Almost 20 cents of every dollar Americans pay in taxes goes directly to paying the interest on this massive IOU.

Earmarks may be only the periphery of the bigger problem, but they tell voters everything they need to know about their elected representatives in Washington. They indicate whether lawmakers are serious about getting federal spending under control — or whether they are content to kick the can down the road.

Two hundred fourteen members of Congress scored zero on a basic fiscal scorecard last year. That's not a math problem. That's a values problem. The only people who can fix the problem are the voters who elected them.

Ken Buck served in the United States House of Representatives from 2015-2024 representing Colorado's 4th congressional district. He now serves as a Fellow with the Independent Center. To find out more about Ken Buck and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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