releases: https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=BAAF78A2-A513-49E3-A1D9-BCEBE236506D
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=BAAF78A2-A513-49E3-A1D9-BCEBE236506D | VIDEO: Flake Vows No Earmarks Until Pigs Fly | 2016-11-16 | 2016 | 2016-11 | Republican | House | AZ | Jeff Flake | F000444 | www.flake.senate.gov | legacy | Washington, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last night delivered remarks in opposition to a proposal to lift the congressional ban on earmarks, which House Republicans are scheduled to vote on today: “Having spent years fighting wasteful spending, I am disappointed that one of the first votes after the election will be on a Republican-led proposal to bring back earmarks. Congress should instead immediately pass legislation to make the ban on earmarks a permanent statutory prohibition. After all, you can’t drain the swamp by feeding the alligators pork,” said Flake. Video of Flake’s remarks can be viewed here.A transcript of Flake’s remarks can be viewed below. *** A lot like indigestion, the desire for earmarks keeps coming back up. Tomorrow afternoon, our colleagues in the House will vote on a provision to overturn the congressional ban on earmarking. As someone who helped to put that ban in place, I believe it’s important to explain why it is very much still a necessity. Consider the following… A teapot museum in North Carolina. An indoor rain forest in Iowa. Bridges to nowhere in Alaska. A Sheep Institute in Montana. A Woodstock museum to commemorate the 1969 concert in New York. A $350 million rocket launch site in Mississippi that was mothballed upon completion that has been derided as the tower to nowhere. The weather museum in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. These are some of the more infamous pork projects that were tucked into bills in Congress here during the bygone earmark era. I believe that during the hay day of earmarking in 2006, there were some 16,000 earmarks spread around the appropriations bills at that time. Members of Congress gleefully touted the outrageous manner in which billions of dollars was being misspent on obscure parochial projects. Earmarks were the currency of what was dubbed the “favor factory” by a super lobbyist who would eventually go to jail for corruption. Earmarks were used to reward campaign donors and political supporters and to buy and sell the votes of politicians. The deciding vote that was necessary to pass Obamacare, for example, was secured with an earmark for Nebraska derided as the “Cornhusker Kickback.” Now Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, in part, as a result of the public disgust with the corruption within the favor factory. When Republicans retook the House of Representatives in 2010, a moratorium was put on congressional earmarking which the Senate also adopted and that remains in place to this day. But some Republicans in the House are now pushing to re-open the favor factory by lifting the moratorium, promising this time it will be different. Now taxpayers ought know these promises are simply hog wash. Having spent years fighting against earmarks, I am disappointed that one of the very first votes after this election will be on a Republican-led proposal to bring back earmarks. Congress should instead immediately pass legislation to make the ban on earmarks a permanent statutory prohibition. After all, you can’t drain the swamp by feeding the alligators pork. With our national debt approaching $20 trillion, taxpayers expect Congress to focus on cutting wasteful and unnecessary spending, instead of pigging out at the trough. One of the worst parts of earmarks are that we spend our time here, when we are earmarking, not providing oversight for the massive appropriation bills that get passed here. That’s the worst part of it. We spend time doling out what amounts to a small portion of the federal budget, but that takes so much time and effort for members and their staff to just secure that small bit of money that we aren’t spending the time that we should providing oversight on the budget. That’s the biggest crime of earmarks, so I hope that we will instead of bringing them back that we will actually pass a statutory to prohibition that will remain. Background: In May 2016, Flake released Twenty Questions: Government Studies That Will Leave You Scratching Your Head. This oversight report highlights 20 hard-to-justify, taxpayer-funded studies that cost taxpayers more than $35 million. Along with the report, Flake introduced the Federal Research Transparency and Accountability Act, to ensure federal research dollars are better directed towards supporting transformative science while rooting out unnecessary spending on lower priority projects. In December 2015, Flake continued retired U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) tradition of publishing an annual Wastebook when he released Wastebook: The Farce Awakens, an oversight report highlighting 100 examples of wasteful government spending that totaled over $100 billion. In November 2015, Flake joined U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in releasing Tackling Paid Patriotism, a report on their joint investigation of taxpayer-funded payments by the Department of Defense to professional sports teams for patriotic displays honoring the U.S. military. This practice has now been banned due to an amendment that Flake, McCain, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) added to the National Defense Authorization Act. In June 2015, Flake responded to calls for a return to the practice of congressional earmarking by releasing Jurassic Pork, a report highlighting the continued cost of pork projects in the post-earmark-ban era. The report, along with Flake’s Jurassic Pork Act, help lead to the elimination of long-term, unobligated transportation earmarks – also called orphan earmarks – in the 2016 omnibus. In December 2014, Flake published the Science of Splurging, a report highlighting more than a dozen examples of wasteful and egregious spending by the Environmental Protection Agency. Additional ongoing efforts by Flake to highlight and eliminate wasteful federal spending include PorkChops, Deep Thoughts from Taxpayer-Funded Studies, and WasteLine. As a member of the House of Representatives, Flake highlighted an Egregious Earmark of the Week from 2003 to 2010. The series concluded when Congress enacted the current self-imposed moratorium on congressional earmarks. ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |