How Spending Reform Transformed Constituent Engagement

A case study in institutional incentives for change

The subtext (and occasionally just text) of this newsletter is that the system we currently have for soliciting and managing constituent engagement for governing at the federal level is inadequate to the task at hand, and needs to change.

This means that I have a lot of conversations with people trying to change that system from both the inside and the outside. One thing that’s been on my mind recently is that these conversations seem clustered at opposite ends of the radical-ness scale: either we need to top-to-bottom overhaul the infrastructure for constituent input — for example, entirely replacing our representative system of government with direct democracy — or make small, incremental, marginal gains to optimize current engagement practices for more accessibility and responsiveness — like hosting better town halls.

Both ends of this spectrum are clearly important, but they can sometimes take oxygen away from more middle-ground changes that might help us map how to get from the incremental to the transformative.

Today, I want to share a case study that feels like one of those missing pieces, about how a top-down reform to the annual Congressional spending process intended to facilitate the passage of spending bills didn’t do that, exactly — but did represent one of the most consequential changes to how Congress does constituent engagement in the last decade.

So today, we’re going to dive deep into the history and return of earmarking, its impact on how Congress thinks about and does constituent engagement, and what it might tell us about creating real change.

The Rise, Fall, and Return of Earmarks

A little bit of context to get us started here:

An “earmark” is a line item inserted into an annual federal spending bill by a Member of Congress that allocates federal money for a specific project recipient — a longstanding federal practice that, at its most optimistic reading, allows Members to leverage their local expertise to identify spending priorities that may fly under the radar of federal agency staff. In the early 2000s, a series of high-profile scandals¹ involving earmarks captured public attention, framing the practice as inextricable from corruption and wasteful spending. After victories by Tea Party fiscal conservatives in Congressional elections in 2010, the practice of earmarking was banned entirely.

However, over the subsequent decade, Congress increasingly struggled to pass spending bills: the period from 2013 to 2019 saw two of the nation’s longest government shutdowns, and a much larger number of shutdown threats.

Facing these challenges, many Congressional scholars, civil society groups, and the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress began reconsidering the potential role earmarks might play in the spending process. They suggested that a reformed earmark program might help reduce budgeting dysfunction and reclaim Congress’ Article I authority by giving individual Members a personal stake in the spending bills.

In 2021, with Democratic control of the White House, House, and Senate, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees announced the return of earmarks — albeit with a rebrand — and significant reforms. In the House, they were renamed “Community Project Funding Requests (CPFs),” while the Senate termed them “Congressionally Directed Spending (CDSs).” These reformed programs were also much more tightly limited, with procedural guardrails intended to prevent corruption and wasteful spending:

• Enhanced transparency: Member offices had to post their funding requests on their websites, and both Appropriations Committees published these requests and identified them in spending bills.

• Limited eligible recipients: Only state, local, municipal, tribal governments, and nonprofits could receive funding — eliminating for-profit companies’ ability to directly receive earmarked funds.

• Spending caps: Earmarks were limited to certain sections of federal spending bills (“eligible accounts”) and capped at 1% of federal discretionary spending.

• Numerical restrictions: Initially, House Members could submit only ten earmark requests (later increased to fifteen); the Senate did not impose limits on numbers of requests.

• Community support requirements: Requesters in the House had to submit evidence of community support for their projects.

• No conflict of interest: Members had to declare that neither they nor their immediate family had any financial interest in the earmark.

• Post-enactment audits: the Government Accountability Office was instructed to audit a percentage of requests after enactment and publish its findings.

Creating a New Constituent Engagement Process

This revived program presented both an opportunity and a capacity challenge for participating Congressional offices. While many offices already accepted other types of appropriations requests from the public, the scale and specificity of rules around CPF/CDS requests meant that this program was additive to offices’ existing workloads. The length of the moratorium also meant that most Member offices (and certainly staff) had not previously handled earmarks under the old system, meaning that most offices were starting from zero experience.

To participate in the program in 2021, Members had to establish an entirely new constituent-facing process in roughly six weeks. This process required several distinct steps:

1. Understanding the guidelines: Offices had to comprehend lengthy guidance from appropriations committees regarding eligible projects and restrictions.

2. Public outreach: Members needed to advertise this funding opportunity to constituents and explain how it might fit into existing government funding plans.

3. Standardized intake: Offices had to develop streamlined processes for receiving and organizing funding requests, including supporting documentation like 990 forms, site plans, etc.

4. Vetting and evaluation: Member office staff needed to validate requests for eligibility, verify the legitimacy of applicants, and assess community support for projects.

5. Selection and notification: With limited slots available on the House side, offices had to choose among competing priorities and communicate decisions to applicants.

6. Committee submission: Finally, selected projects needed proper formatting for submission to the appropriations committees.

This was no small undertaking for Congressional offices — and in fact, recognizing the duplicative capacity burden this placed on participating offices, developing support resources (including templates, vetting guides, and sample timelines) for Members offices to run a smooth and transparent process was one of POPVOX Foundation’s first projects in the spring of 2021.²

Incepting more engagement

Despite these challenges, the program was widely adopted in its first year: on the House side, 74% of House offices submitted at least one CPF request, including 51% of the Republican conference and all but one Democratic office. Member offices submitted funding requests for everything from fire station renovations to community mental health programs to apprenticeship training organizations to military base construction. Member appearances at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects funded by CPFs/CDSs became a fixture on local calendars — whether the Member who submitted the requests eventually voted for the full spending bill or not.

However, beyond the individual CPF/CDS requests submitted and won, something else happened, too: Member offices began experimenting with how to use this opportunity to solicit constituent input in new ways.

For example, Representative Chris Pappas [D, NH] partnered with a local newspaper to create a public comment system where district residents could provide comments on submitted requests.

Representative Don Young [R, AK], an old hand at the earmark process pre-moratorium, created state-wide surveys asking Alaskans where they believed his office should prioritize requests.

Many offices convened local advisory councils of community stakeholders (e.g., local elected officials, tribal officials, veterans’ service officers, etc.) to help evaluate and prioritize project submissions. While these obviously served a political purpose — creating some air cover for the Member office having to turn down qualified requests — they also represented a formalized process for soliciting expert and community input to drive Member office decisions.

Even more interestingly, the return of earmarking also reshaped how Member offices handle engagement in other ways.

From a Member office perspective, it is always difficult to tell an important stakeholder “no” — but with a limited number of possible CPF requests on the House side, it’s pretty much unavoidable. To limit the damage to important relationships, House offices had to look for ways to provide a “no…but” response, where the office could turn down the earmark request but provide something else. For many offices, this was possible through a new investment in constituent services related to federal grants.

We see this in a noticeable uptick in the number of Congressional newsletters mentioning “federal grants” between 2015 and 2025, including a spike around the first year of the reformed earmarks program.

Credit: DC Inbox

Besides doing more communications work to flag federal grant opportunities, many offices also began hiring specific named “grants coordinator” positions, with these staff members leading or coordinating grants workshops on the full landscape of federal funding opportunities, and running formalized processes to provide letters of support on behalf of the grant requestor from the Member of Congress — presenting CPFs as just one way of several that Member offices can provide direct services to constituents seeking federal funding for local projects.

The increased Member office interest in federal grants programs also continues to drive a virtuous cycle where institutional offices develop additional support resources to help Member offices run grants programs — for example, the House Chief Administrative Officer’s Coach Program hosts a monthly grants discussion for Member office field staff, promoting information-sharing between offices — which in turn helps normalize grants facilitation as an expected part of Congressional office outreach.

What does this tell us about long-term transformation?

Since 2021, the renewed, reformed Congressionally-Directed Spending has survived through the 117th, 118th, and now into the 119th Congresses, showing some staying power despite ongoing political wrangling over what types of projects are eligible — and despite the fact that the reintroduction of earmarks has clearly not solved the dysfunction of the federal spending process as intended.

With the program’s survival, the annual spending process now represents an annual process for participating Members to conduct proactive outreach in their communities to identify local needs, further develop relationships with stakeholder organizations and government entities, and do communications work educating constituents on the role of Congress and the federal spending process. The increased Member office interest in exploring opportunities for grants-focused engagement also means there are now more resources available for all Members on grants work — whether they participate in CPF/CDS or not.

It’s not perfect by any means — the process is still time-consuming and confusing for both constituents and Member offices.³ But on the whole, especially taking into account the normalized investment in grants facilitation, it does represent a significant, long-lasting change to how Congress handles constituent engagement.

For me, there are three big takeaways from this case study on institutional change and constituent engagement:

1. The role of a Member of Congress is increasingly direct service-oriented. The 118th Congress passed the fewest laws in decades, meaning that Members have fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves and demonstrate their impact through legislation — and more incentive to serve their communities and constituents through direct service, including casework, Congressionally-Directed Spending, and other services. Yes, those services are always communications and branding opportunities — and understanding that symbiotic relationship is critical for understanding the reorientation and resource allocation for most Congressional offices today.

2. Relatedly, the success of this program was directly related to the fact that Members could individually (more or less) directly control the outcomes. Unlike asking an individual Member to convene or participate in a policy-oriented deliberative process where they may have little ability to impact policy, individual Members could and did have the ability to push CPF/CDS requests through the spending process. Constituent engagement in the process could translate to a visible, tangible outcome in a relatively short span of time.

3. Finally, for democratic reformers and proponents of deliberative democracy: this is a case study for how a top-down, institutional reform can become an opportunity for Members of Congress to build the institutional muscles and practices for more deliberative processes down the road. The more Congress’ current activities can promote constituent input and deliberation, the less that other deliberative practices will seem foreign, risky, and arcane in the future — a productive middle ground between marginal and macro reforms.

Check your voicemail

• Remember how I included a “throw a party” category in our map of 40 different methods and modes of constituent engagement — and got some questions about it? Senator Sanders [D, VT] has a new entry into this category with a series of community dances. Sounds like fun!

• Hearing from Congressional offices that they are managing a lot more constituent anxiety about losing access to services — one way the headlines drive engagement right now.

• We’d guess that these long lines to get into Congressional buildings are more a product of fly-in season than overall engagement, but let us know if you have a different take.

• Putting numbers on engagement: Senator Cory Booker’s [D, NJ] team reported that they received 14,000 voicemails from constituents during his record-breaking filibuster.

• Interesting to see some of the high-profile deportation cases recently explicitly framed as constituent service.

• Town hall coverage, town hall coverage, and more town hall coverage. We’re plotting an interview on town halls soon — stay tuned!

• Environmental factors for constituent engagement: new research shows Gen Z Americans are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than other generations.

• We love you, Gen Z, really — but new research also shows that Gen Z Americans are more open to political violence as a mechanism for change than other generations.

• Research from the Trust for Civic Life delves into the state of local civic engagement and trust — critical for district and state offices!

• The Trump Administration announced a move to skip public comment in efforts to speed up the process of eliminating regulations the Administration finds to be unlawful. As my administrative lawyer boss put it: “Courts overturning this in 3…2…1…”

• The American Customer Satisfaction Index launched a new metric measuring the “efficiency gap:” where Americans perceive the greatest need for more efficiency in federal services.

• While this newsletter focuses on tech and practices for engagement on the governing side, we’ve talked about how campaign engagement trends eventually make their way across the wall — so it’s interesting to watch battles over what to do with the @KamalaHQ TikTok account, and the DNC’s RFP on new organizing software.

1. 2004: Jack Abramoff fleeced millions of dollars from American Indian tribes to secure earmarks related to casinos, leading to high-profile Congressional investigations.

2005: Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham admitted to taking $2.4 million (and creating a literal bribe menu) for securing earmarks for defense contractors.

2006: The Gravina Island “Bridge to Nowhere” became a visible symbol of wasteful federal earmark spending.

2. To be clear: POPVOX Foundation does not take a formal position on whether earmarks are a good thing or not — rather, we abide by what my boss, Marci Harris, called the “WHAM rule:” if you’re gonna do it, do it right. Our resources were intended to help reduce the duplicative efforts and overall capacity drain of 441 individual offices developing their own materials from scratch, and to encourage offices to design their processes around accessibility and transparency while we were at it.

3. For example, the year-long Continuing Resolution for FY2025 did not include earmarks submitted as part of FY2025 spending bills, leaving House offices in a difficult position as they consider whether to re-submit last year’s requests for FY2026, or to reopen their competitive requests process.