US universities ride revival of congressional earmark funding

In the three years since the US Congress revived the budgetary set-asides known as earmarks, universities have been doing especially well, emerging as a favourite bipartisan beneficiary, a new tally has affirmed.

Education-related projects – mostly involving university research – remain in 2024 the largest single category of earmarks, although environmental-related projects are catching up, according to the latest annual compilation by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS counted universities as pulling down about 20 per cent of the $650 million (£509 million) of earmarks that involved science, reflecting a resumption of the sector’s leading status from before the 10-year suspension of earmarks that Congress imposed out of a sense that the system had got out of hand. Universities also likely collected substantial numbers of earmarks outside the sciences, which the AAAS said it did not track.

“Universities are up there” in the earmark competition, said E. J. Fagan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago and part of a research team that has separately tracked earmarks.

Earmarks in higher education are often used for purposes such as buying new equipment, renovating facilities, and developing and expanding educational programmes. The awards typically amount to only about $1 million or so per project, but they still represent an important boost for the institutions that can get them, Dr Fagan said.

In fact, universities are doing so well that they might keep in mind the historically politically contentious nature of earmarks and strategically choose to be less aggressive in pursuing them, said Alessandra Zimmermann, an AAAS budget analyst who co-authored the analysis.

“Earmarks were removed for 10 years because of excessive spending and are still hotly contested,” Dr Zimmermann said. “If people get overzealous with them, they could disappear again.”

That is reflected in the fact that – although support for education funding, including earmarks, is generally bipartisan – Democrats are shown in the AAAS data to be significantly more likely than Republicans to have obtained education-related earmarks for beneficiaries in their states or districts.

Still, any fear of Republicans shutting down earmarks again because of too many education projects, seemed unlikely, Dr Fagan said. “Universities are local,” he said. “So even a Republican member of Congress who’s not crazy about higher education cares about their local university, their local state college.”

Earmarks give individual members of the House and Senate a means to secure money for projects in their districts without going through the usual budget appropriations processes. The requests are, however, subject to negotiations among lawmakers and annual per-member limits.

Education-related projects, especially those involving research, have something of a built-in advantage because of rules for earmarks that include a ban on for-profit recipients and norms that favour discrete projects in roughly the million-dollar range, the experts said.

Those terms are well suited to university research, Dr Fagan said. “If I’m a university president,” he added, “that’s one of the first things I’m asking for.”

The relative smoothness of the earmarks system does, however, also point out the broader failure of the normal budgetary appropriations in Congress, said Joanne Carney, the AAAS’ chief government affairs officer.

Burdened by heavy partisan animosities, Congress rarely passes the nation’s budget on time, and often months late. “At a minimum, Congress should make finalising appropriations and funding research and development a priority,” Ms Carney said. “Operating under a CR for months”, she said, referring to the chronic use of so-called continuing resolutions that temporarily fund the government during prolonged budget debates, “is not an effective mechanism for accelerating our innovation ecosystem.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com