Instead earmarking is a constitutional function of congress. The constitution gives the congress the responsibility to spend money. It doesn’t say the congress is supposed to appropriate money then turn it over to an unaccountable bureaucracy controlled by the executive branch to determine how the money is spent.

Ideally, 100% of the money which Congress appropriated would be earmarked for whatever Congress specifically wanted it to be spent upon. The fact that Congress can’t do that just points out how large and out of control the government has become. If we do ever reach the point where government shrinks to an appropriate size, I hope to God that earmarking is still around.

There have been problems with earmarks

1) Congressmen using it to bring home the bacon by creating unnecessary public works projects, grants, etc. to their home district to help assure their re-election. Here the problem isn’t the earmark as much as it is congress ignoring the constitution. If we followed the constitution, this pork barrel garbage wouldn’t exist.

But in any case, every congressman doing this deserves to be slammed.

2) Earmarks in the past could be made anonymously. They could be placed into a bill by a lawmaker, by a staffer at the direction of a lawmaker, or by a staffer who just wants it in there and does it without telling anyone. One of the earmark reforms in recent years was to get rid of this practice but I don’t recall offhand if that reform effort was successful or not.

Earmarks should never be made anonymously. The only reason to make it anonymous is if you aren’t proud of what you are doing and don’t want to be held accountable. Escaping responsibility for your actions should never be an option for an elected official.

3) Earmarks are sometimes placed into a bill at the last moment and the legislators voting on it are not aware that the bill has been changed. Getting an earmark into law this way is fundamentally dishonest and doesn’t happen often unless the earmark is also anonymous.

Delaying legislation for several days between the final version of the bill and the vote on it so that lawmakers and the public can read the legislation along with the ban on anonymous earmarks would fix this problem.

4) Earmarks are sometimes added to a bill after the legislators have voted on it though a small variety of political shenanigans whose details aren’t worth going into. This should be outright banned.

If you ban the abuses, you fix the earmarking problem. I don’t think its desirable to ban earmarking altogether, If a congressman sees something he thinks the government should spend money upon, I think its entirely appropriate for him to direct an agency to spend its money on that item rather than spending its money at random on other things. (To go a step further, I’m not entirely sure it would be constitutional to ban earmarking through passing a law rather than just using House and Senate rules. Directing how money is spent would seem to be one of the legitimate functions of congress.)

We hear about the various abuses of earmarks but you don’t hear about the successes because no one talks about them, If I recall correctly, smart bombs, the Predator drones, and the tilt-wing Osprey have all benefited or been kept alive entirely because some congressman had the vision to see how useful it would be and made sure the program survived. In my opinion, its a legitimate function of government for a congressman to see something constitutional which would benefit the country, try to direct money toward it, then get his fellow lawmakers to vote for it.