N.J. missed out on $219 million in federal earmarks under stopgap bill – but are they gone for good?

When Congress passed a stopgap funding bill last week to keep the government running through September, one casualty was earmarks – billions of dollars of funds that had been requested by members of Congress for local projects in their districts. New Jersey alone failed to get more than $200 million in dedicated funding that had been requested by its members of Congress and approved for inclusion in appropriations legislation.

But as New Jersey’s Republican representatives are keen to point out, that doesn’t guarantee that funding for those projects – ranging from flood mitigation to bike paths to new police radio equipment – is dead. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) told the New Jersey Globe that he believes his more than $22 million in earmarks could still be signed into law, and that intends to keep pushing to make that happen in any way he can.

“I’m going to continue to advocate for it with the Appropriations Committee,” Van Drew said. “Nothing’s been dropped; nothing’s been taken out. All are in place, all are in that proposed budget… We’re not giving up on FY2025.”

Continuing resolutions (CRs) like the one Congress passed last week typically don’t include earmarks, officially called Community Project Funds, so it wasn’t a surprise they were left out. But what’s different this year is that the CR funds the government through September 30 – the end of Fiscal Year 2025 – effectively negating any need for further FY2025 appropriations legislation that would include earmarks and moving the ball ahead to FY2026.

But Van Drew said he hopes Congress will still take up a proper FY2025 appropriations package even though it doesn’t officially need to, and that package could include the earmarks that were excluded from the CR. Another option is that the earmarks could be passed as a standalone bill, a possibility that one GOP staffer told the Globe is currently under consideration in House Republican circles.

“Anything can be done,” Van Drew said. “If leadership wants to do it and we’ve got the numbers to get it through, anything’s possible. I’m not being purposefully vague here, but there are different opportunities and possibilities.”

But Democrats, still smarting over being shut out of the negotiations for the stopgap funding bill, are skeptical that anything of that sort will come to pass. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), the lone New Jerseyan on the House Appropriations Committee, scoffed at the idea that Republicans, who have struggled to pass government funding bills ever since they retook control of the House in 2023, would suddenly come back and restart the FY2025 appropriations process.

“It’s verging on delusional to believe that Republicans will use the months they’ve bought themselves with this stopgap measure to actually go through the appropriations process,” Watson Coleman said. “We’ve been through this before, over and over and over again, and they never get around to it.”

“And even in the event that appropriations bills are passed out of our committee one by one, as they’re supposed to be, it would be for the next fiscal year,” she added. “The ship has sailed for fiscal year 2025.”

If efforts to pass either a belated FY2025 budget or a standalone earmarks bill don’t come to pass, then the projects that New Jersey members had obtained funding for could be rolled over into FY2026. But that would likely mean pushing off any new projects that otherwise would have been included in the FY2026 budget, thus essentially resulting in a lost year for the earmark process.

Or, Van Drew said, there’s always the possibility that earmarks will go kaput entirely. When Republicans won the House in 2010, they eliminated the earmark system, which had drawn years of unfavorable headlines after some members abused the system; they were brought back in 2021 with new disclosure and transparency guidelines in place, but Van Drew – an earmark supporter – didn’t seem entirely confident that they’re here to stay.

“The worst scenario is we don’t do earmarks anymore,” Van Drew said. “We’ve had that vote, we’ve had that question; the vast majority of us, not all but most of us, agree that we should continue with them.”

As has also been detailed extensively by NJ Spotlight News, New Jersey was set to obtain funding that totaled around $219 million spread across every county and congressional district. (That total is excluding some funding that would have likely been obtained by Senator Cory Booker as part of a Homeland Security appropriations bill that was never released.)

The projects that won’t get funding – or, if they do, will get it later than had been anticipated – include purchasing new fire trucks, upgrading sewer and wastewater systems, supporting anti-domestic violence programs, and making pedestrian safety improvements at dangerous intersections. Some, like a major flood reduction project in the city of Plainfield, were set to receive millions of dollars; others, like an $80,000 grant for film education programs at the Montclair Film Festival, only represented the tiniest fraction of the federal budget.

And it’s Republicans who stand to lose the most if earmarks aren’t restored. Aside from Booker, whose earmark domain covers the entire state, Reps. Van Drew and Chris Smith (R-Manchester) were set to receive the most earmark funding at $22.5 million and $22.4 million, respectively. The top two Democratic House members were Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) at $18.2 million and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) at $16.8 million.

(Two New Jersey members of Congress were largely or entirely excluded from the earmarks process: former Senator Bob Menendez, who was in the midst of a corruption trial during the earmarking process and whose only listed projects are in tandem with Booker, and the late Rep. Donald Payne Jr., who died prior to the earmark deadline in May 2024.)

Earmarks also have an undeniable political purpose, one that has drawn criticism as “pork” in the past: concrete proof to voters that their representatives are delivering money for their local communities. For swing-district members like Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), a loss or delay in earmarks could hit especially hard; Kean said in a statement that he was glad to support the stopgap funding bill but that he intends to keep fighting for community project funding.

“We recently built a strong bipartisan coalition to keep our government open and I will continue delivering priority projects and funding for New Jersey,” Kean said.

FY2025 community funding requests