A dozen states in each of the past two budget cycles received no earmarks in the Senate bills because their GOP senators don’t participate. Aside from the aforementioned Florida and Texas, they include Kentucky, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.
Due to former GOP Sen. Roy Blunt’s retirement, Missouri is now part of that list, while Nebraska has dropped off since Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb, started asking for earmarks this year, her first on the Appropriations Committee.
To the appropriators go the spoils
In the Senate, the needs of smaller, rural states are often taken care of by senior Appropriations members who make many of the panel’s key funding decisions.
Aside from Collins, the top four earmarking states’ senators include the leaders of the Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, the largest individual source of earmarks: Chairman Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and ranking member Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss. Other influential members of those delegations also lend their weight to earmark requests, such as Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the Armed Services panel ranking member.
Murkowski, the Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member, doesn’t get any earmarking help from Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, but she doesn’t need it.
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