By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

The earmark game, steering relatively small amounts of money back home for police departments, road improvements, sewers, hospitals, job training centers, youth outreach programs and parks, is more than just a congressional pastime.

Although special projects are relatively small in the context of the federal budget, many lawmakers view getting them as an essential part of their job, and they devote much of their energy to the chase. This process, as much as anything else, illustrates the ways power is gained and exercised on Capitol Hill. One’s ability to garner earmarks is further evidence that, as elsewhere in politics, who you know can mean far more than what you know.

CHAMBER OF SPECIAL FAVORS: House appropriators reserved almost half of all earmarks for themselves. (CQ / SCOTT J. FERRELL)

Until now, only the rough outlines of the distribution system for appropriations earmarks have been evident. But the rules about the disclosure of earmarks have changed this year, and more information than ever is available about how many special projects are singled out in spending bills, for how much money, and at whose behest. With a little effort, it’s now possible to see just which lawmakers stand to benefit the most.

The details that are known about earmarking paint a picture of the powerful using taxpayer dollars to add to their influence. This system, perpetuated by party leaders who use projects as political leverage and blessed collectively by the lawmakers who receive them, produces stark disparities between swing-seat moderates and safe-seat party loyalists, elected leaders and the rank and file, and, most of all, appropriators and everyone else.

One difference that stands out is between white lawmakers and their black and Hispanic counterparts. White Democrats, on average, are credited with almost twice as much in earmarks as black lawmakers, and more than twice as much as Hispanic members.

It’s probably no surprise that lawmakers who sit on the Appropriations Committee lay claim to more spending earmarks than any other clearly identifiable group in the House. They do, after all, write the bills. But the 37 Democrats and 29 Republicans on the spending panel together account for 45 percent of the $4.2 billion in earmarks credited to individual lawmakers in the House-passed spending bills for fiscal 2008.

House leaders, including the chairmen and ranking minority members of committees, also do very well. And so do a relatively few lawmakers who are perceived as having weak holds on their seats and who might benefit from being able to show their constituents that they can deliver. Together with the appropriators, those favored groups combined account for three-quarters of all the money set aside for individual member-sponsored projects.

Then there is Pennsylvania Democrat John P. Murtha , chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He is the sole named sponsor of almost $180 million in earmarks — 4 percent of the total.

“If the distribution is unequal based on political power, on committee positions and on race, that’s very troubling,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit budget watchdog group that has compiled detailed lists of earmarks from the 12 House-passed spending bills for fiscal 2008.

Her organization identified more than 7,000 specific House-passed earmarks, concentrated in just eight of the bills, and matched up separate listings of projects with dollar amounts and the lawmakers identified as requesting them. An analysis of the data by Congressional Quarterly shows that more than 500 were sought by the White House and roughly 1,000 were identified with more than one sponsor. That left about 5,670 earmarks, worth a combined $4.2 billion, each linked with a single House member.

This study looks most directly at those single-member projects. Also, because the Senate has completed only four of its 12 spending bills, and none have been considered by a conference committee, the earmarking process has yet to run its course for this year. The result may be that some House-passed earmarks are dropped or eventually assigned to Senate sponsors.

Earmarking is serious business — even if the total dollar amounts appear tiny alongside multibillion-dollar defense contracts and the enormous outlays for Social Security and Medicare. And much remains hidden about how earmarks are selected. While the House Appropriations Committee says there were 33,000 requests for earmarks this year — five times as many as were granted — it’s almost impossible to know which requests for special projects were denied, because most lawmakers won’t talk about it. Nonetheless, it is now possible to compare the ability of each lawmaker to secure earmarks with the success of his colleagues.

One place House leaders appeared to try to treat lawmakers almost equally was in dividing the earmark pie between the two parties. Democrats are listed as sponsors of 58 percent of the total amount of House-passed earmarks. Still, that’s just enough greater than their 54 percent share of the chamber’s seats that the average Democrat is credited with about $10.3 million, and the average Republican $8.7 million.

On average, men appear to fare slightly better than women. The average male lawmaker is credited with $9.7 million in earmarks, and the average woman $8.9 million. But the range overwhelms any notion of average. Texan Sheila Jackson-Lee has the smallest total among Democrats (except for the delegates from Guam and American Samoa). She can claim just $750,000, less than half of 1 percent of Murtha’s total.

At the same time, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, the most senior woman in the House, are each credited with more than $65 million in earmarks.

In contrast, the chamber’s African-Americans and Hispanics do not do nearly as well as their white counterparts. The average white Democrat is listed as sponsoring $12 million in earmarks. For the average member of the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus, the total is $6.1 million; for the average Hispanic Democrat, it’s $5.7 million. Those averages among the 66 black and Hispanic members of the House are lifted by the five black and four Hispanic appropriators.

“The disparity is here. It’s real,” said Alcee L. Hastings , who represents one of two black-majority districts in Florida.

This contrast is seen by many observers and lawmakers alike as a reflection of politics taking precedence over needy citizens, because many black and Hispanic members represent districts that are among the poorest in the nation. The statistics on racial and ethnic disparity are dismaying but not surprising, said Alexander. “It reinforces the fact that this is a process about almost anything but need.”

If earmarks were spread evenly among all lawmakers and the five delegates who are authorized to vote only in committee, each would get about $9.6 million.

Helping the Vulnerable

It’s not close to even, though. That number is skewed by big recipients like Murtha, Pelosi, Kaptur and David R. Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, whose earmarks total $93 million. On the other side of the aisle, the senior Republican on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, C.W. Bill Young of Florida, is credited with $129 million in special projects, and the senior GOP member of the full committee, Jerry Lewis of California, has $110 million.

How Many and How Much: Click here to view chart

But it is not just the veterans of the earmark game who succeed at it. Democrats and Republicans alike allocate earmarks to keep Democratic seats blue and Republican seats red, providing extra bursts of cash to districts that might switch parties.

That helps explain why freshman New York Democrat John Hall , who has a tenuous hold on a district based in a well-to-do New York City exurb, has $8 million in earmarks spread across six spending bills. Hall won his election in 2006 by a margin of less than 5,000 votes and is considered an attractive electoral target for the GOP, so Democratic leaders looked to shore him up by providing earmarked dollars that can be used to tout his Washington clout back home.

Hall’s take is typical for the 25 Democrats Congressional Quarterly recently identified as the most vulnerable in the 2008 election. Those lawmakers, almost all of whom are freshmen, averaged $8.5 million.

Contrast his list of earmarks with that of Nydia M. Velázquez , whose New York City district is an hour’s drive away, considerably less well off and more than 75 percent minority. Velázquez is credited with just $2.6 million in earmarks, though she is the first Hispanic woman to wield a committee gavel. Democratic leaders have no reason to worry that her seat will flip into Republican hands, however, because she has won each of her general elections with at least 77 percent of the vote.

The use of earmarked dollars to help insulate endangered incumbents isn’t confined to Democrats. The 25 most vulnerable Republicans averaged $9.1 million in earmarks.

Less than an hour’s drive to the northeast of Velázquez’s district, longtime Republican Christopher Shays , one of those threatened members, is trying to deepen his foothold in the wealthiest district in Connecticut.

Shays, who has compiled one of the least loyal voting records among Republicans in recent years and even threatened to resign if he is again passed over for the top Republican post on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was the only New England Republican to survive the 2006 political tsunami that swept Democrats to power in the House. He won with 51 percent of the vote in a district that is home to Long Island Sound’s “Gold Coast.”

Shays is in line to take home more than $16 million in earmarks, ranking him 21st among Republicans overall, and behind only Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri and ranking Armed Services Republican Duncan Hunter of California, among lawmakers not on the Appropriations Committee.

A ‘Huge Distraction’

The new transparency is the result of public outrage over corruption scandals and easy-to-scorn earmarks, such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” in the 2005 reauthorization of highway programs. The new House rules require committees to identify projects, amounts and sponsors before bills reach the floor. In the past, some earmarks have been listed in tabular form, but sponsors haven’t been identified.

Top Earmark Sponsors by Bill: Click here to view chart

Some believe the process is still too secretive, and others say they should be banned altogether. But the argument for earmarks is that lawmakers know their own districts best, and they can use earmarks as a cushion or filler against gaps left by government programs.

During debate over the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill in July, for example, Obey told of a poor Wisconsin mother who held her son down as her husband pulled the braces off the child’s teeth with a pair of pliers. Before opting for the cheap but draconian home remedy, the family had visited 31 dentists, none of whom would accept payment from Medicaid.

With stories like that in mind, Obey included an earmark in the bill to provide $225,000 for dental services in Turtle Lake, Wis., a rural hamlet about 75 miles northeast of Minneapolis. “We’ve got people who will come from halfway across the state who will come because they can’t get access,” Obey said in explaining the Turtle Lake project.

“People are elected to office to solve problems for their districts,” said Scott Lilly, a former Appropriations staff director and aide to Obey who now works at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. “Sometimes national programs are not set up in a way that solves the problems or that would cost too much money. Earmarks are a way to reach in and take care of a particular problem and do what members are supposed to.”

But for the school systems, hospitals, dental clinics and other domestic agencies that typically are given earmarks in Obey’s Labor-HHS-Education bill, it has been a rough few years. For fiscal 2006, under Republican control, earmarks were dropped from the bill to make room for more spending on agency budgets. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, all programs were funded through a continuing resolution that included no new earmarks. For fiscal 2008, Obey’s committee chose to cut the amount of earmarked money in half.

The absence of earmarked money was a minor nuisance for some programs that had been used to it, a serious setback for others and, according to lawmakers, a mortal blow for those that were most dependent upon federal assistance.

Even so, House Democratic leaders cite the reduction in earmarks to argue that the system has been improved under their control. “You’re at half the money that you were before,” said Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois. “Everybody gets less than they have over the last 12 years.”

Yet, because lawmakers use their earmarks as evidence of their effectiveness in Congress, there is little guarantee that today’s increased transparency will change behaviors and cut down on abuses of the system.

“I would like to tell you that all of our dear friends in Congress are motivated by the purest” intentions, said James W. Dyer, a former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, who says earmarks in the past have been used to sway members on tough votes. “Every once in a while there’s a little extra cookie on the dessert plate that maybe makes the meal go down faster.”

Lilly contends that too much time and effort goes into earmarking. “The real indictment of the system right now is that they’re all trying to figure out how to game the system,” he said. “It has become a huge distraction in which the Congress doesn’t do the work that the Congress is supposed to do.”

The transparency rules now in effect also do little to allow the public — or most lawmakers — to assess whether the process of earmarking makes the best use of scarce money. Very few House members chose this year to make public their lists of applications. Those lists that are available detail tens of millions of dollars of requests that went unfunded — details that help explain their process and priorities to the public but which might come back to haunt lawmakers at home if losing projects complain about those that won out.

A similar dynamic might influence future appropriations debates in Congress: If winners and losers can be readily identified, the losers may revolt.

Lilly and Dyer both said that passing spending bills would have been much trickier this year if the information on earmarks had been more accessible. But a committee sleight of hand prevented close scrutiny because dollar values for earmarks were listed separately from sponsor names, and lists published electronically weren’t searchable.

“One of the big issues in this disclosure was not whether or not the press would find out about who was getting money and how much they were getting, it was about whether members would find out,” Lilly said.

Some lawmakers also say that the new transparency rules might lead colleagues to avoid requesting projects not in their districts, even if they have merit. Republican David L. Hobson of Ohio, who was chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee in the last Congress, said he sometimes funded projects that he thought were in the national interest, even if they were in another part of the country. “The rules are going to make that difficult in the future,” he said.

Those most familiar with the statistics on earmarks say that the disclosure rules have provided new information but raise nearly as many questions as they answer.

“We don’t know what they’re saying no to. We don’t know why they’re saying yes to what they’re saying yes to, and we don’t know why they’re saying no to what they’re saying no to,” said Alexander. “We still don’t really know what’s going on.”

The new disclosures by the Appropriations Committee provide a clear picture of who gets what, but only the lawmakers who write the bills, lobby for projects and win or lose the earmark war can say why

The Earmark Mill at Murtha’s Corner

John P. Murtha always sits in the last seat on the right in the back pew of the Democratic side, and the white-haired, jowly Pennsylvanian is generally in the chamber whenever the House is voting. A Marine decorated in Vietnam, and a veteran of countless political wars in the House, Murtha has held the top Democratic spot on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee for more than 18 years — long before his opposition to the Iraq War turned him into a national political figure.

Murtha Heads the List: Click here to view chart

He is the man lawmakers come to if they want a little money for a special project back home. And the place where they pay tribute is Murtha’s Corner, especially during appropriations season.

“There definitely is a line that lines up, and members are very serious about it when they’re lining up with their asks,” said California Democrat Loretta Sanchez , who is credited with $8 million in earmarks in the House-passed Pentagon spending bill for fiscal 2008. “I did better than average because I have a defense industry here and because I work closely with Jack Murtha.”

Proximity to Murtha — physical, political or metaphorical — is a clear indicator of likely success in the quest for special projects: Lawmakers from his own state and other Rust Belt districts, longtime colleagues from the clubby Appropriations Committee and congressmen with similar lunch-bucket Democrat backgrounds tend to populate his favored circle. And that is borne out by a review of more than 1,000 earmarks in the Defense appropriations bill, worth almost $2.4 billion.

There are no assigned seats in the House chamber, but Murtha’s spot is vacant when he’s not there: No one dares sit there. When Murtha does settle in, the back rows near him fill quickly. So, too, does the standing room around the chairman’s political nerve center — a bazaar in which stories, jokes, votes, information and earmarks are swapped.

So beneficial can a trip to Murtha’s Corner be that even the most intensely partisan Republicans are willing to cross the aisle for a visit in an emergency. Texan Tom DeLay, during his time as the combative GOP whip and majority leader, sought help on close votes on occasion. “He comes over to the corner, and we work it out,” Murtha explained in a 2003 interview.

Fellow defense appropriators, Pennsylvanians and a handful of other pals surround the chairman when Murtha is in the chamber. They are his chief political lieutenants and the primary recipients of his largess. Like all Appropriations subcommittee chairmen, Murtha is alone in deciding who will get the earmarks in his bill. And he takes care of his allies right after taking care of himself.

Statistics on House-passed earmarks were compiled this year by the budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, after a change in House rules required details on dollar amounts and sponsors to be published. An analysis of the group’s data by Congressional Quarterly showed that Murtha is credited with about $167 million in earmarks in the Defense measure alone — about 7 percent of the bill’s entire pot — and almost $180 million across all eight fiscal 2008 bills that contain lawmaker-requested projects. (As many as 1,500 additional earmarks worth $7.2 billion are credited to multiple lawmakers and to President Bush, and as a result are excluded from the individual member totals in this analysis.) (Methodology, p. 2840)

Defense Muscle

Murtha’s grand total is almost double the $93 million attributed to Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey of Wisconsin and two-and-a-half times as large as the $67 million total for earmarks reserved for Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

The Pentagon spending bill contains such a large share of all the earmarked dollars that the big winners in that bill tend to do best overall. Of the top 10 Democratic earmark recipients, six are Defense appropriators. The other four are Obey, Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland and Majority Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina.

The nine Democrats on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, including Murtha, account for $553 million, or 23 percent, of the Defense earmarks sponsored by a single lawmaker.

Many Defense appropriators are also personally close to Murtha, which makes it impossible to know whether they fare better than they would have otherwise because of their relationships with him.

But lawmakers certainly assume their closeness counts. “I hope so,” said Defense appropriator Marcy Kaptur of Ohio. “You’ll have to ask Jack,” said James P. Moran of Virginia, another member of the subcommittee.

In a brief interview, Murtha said simply that he takes responsibility for every earmark in the bill. Some lawmakers say privately that Murtha’s favoritism is easy to see.

“Appropriators, Pennsylvanians and the Murtha clique” observed one lawmaker without hesitation when shown a list of top earmark recipients. The lawmaker asked not to be identified to avoid angering the chairman.

“There’s nothing remarkable” about Murtha looking out for his friends, said Republican Jack Kingston of Georgia, another member of the subcommittee, and the sponsor of $52 million in earmarks. “You work with him, he’s going to work with you.”

Once his fellow Defense appropriators are taken care of, Murtha sends money to the districts of fellow Pennsylvanians and his out-of-state allies.

Mike Doyle , a friend of the chairman who represents Pittsburgh and the suburbs that spread out toward Murtha’s territory, collected $18 million in earmarks, $16 million from the Defense bill alone. Doyle is a mid-rank member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, holds no leadership position or subcommittee gavel, and sits in a safely Democratic seat, all of which make it unlikely that he would win an outsized share of earmarked dollars. But his total exceeds those of 22 Democrats on the Appropriations panel.

Similarly, fellow Pennsylvanians Robert A. Brady , Tim Holden and Paul E. Kanjorski all benefited from Murtha’s writing of the Defense bill, and all, as a result, are identified with more in earmarks than most Democrats. In all, eight of the top 40 Democratic recipients of Defense earmarks are from the 11-member Pennsylvania Democratic delegation. And four of the top five freshman earmark recipients — Jason Altmire , Christopher Carney , Patrick J. Murphy and Joe Sestak — are Pennsylvanians who, with Murtha’s support, knocked off Republican incumbents in 2006.

“Defense is his bailiwick. He was definitely helpful there,” said Altmire, who is credited with $9 million in Defense earmarks and more than $12 million overall, putting him in the top 10 percent of the House.

Murtha has also brought fellow Rust Belt lawmakers such as Tim Ryan of Ohio under his wing. Ryan, a three-term lawmaker who is new to the Appropriations panel this year, is identified with $16 million in earmarks, $4 million of which is in the Defense bill. Ryan did better than any of his fellow newcomers to the committee, as well as the chairmen of two of the dozen Appropriations subcommittees, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida and José E. Serrano of New York.

Most of Ryan’s earmarks are in the Energy and Water bill, where he ranks seventh among Democrats. The bill was written by another Murtha ally, subcommittee Chairman Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana, who also sits on the Defense panel.

While it’s impossible to know what influence Murtha may have had on bills he did not control, the Appropriations subcommittee chairmen have long traded favors, and Murtha’s primacy is clear. In addition to tallying the most Defense bill earmarks, his is the fourth-highest earmark total among Democrats in the Commerce-Justice-Science bill, sixth-highest in the Interior bill, seventh in the Labor-HHS-Education bill and 15th in the Transportation-Housing and Urban Development bill.

Whether lawmakers resent Murtha’s ways or not, complaints are rare, and public objections almost non-existent. “He’s been fair to me, so I can’t bitch,” said Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who is credited with $5 million in Defense bill earmarks and $7.5 million overall, which puts him in the top half of the Democratic Caucus. “If I got screwed, I’d bitch.”

The limits of Murtha’s influence — and of the Democrats’ appetite for his political style — were evident when he was trounced by Hoyer, 149-86, in a race for majority leader at the beginning of the 110th Congress, despite Pelosi’s official endorsement.

But James W. Dyer, a former Republican staff director of the Appropriations Committee who praises Murtha’s ability to keep the legislative process moving, said he knows what he would do if he were a member of the House. “I’d start reserving seats,” said Dyer, who now works as a lobbyist at Clark & Weinstock. “That third seat from Murtha on the right? I’ll put my name on it.”

Obscure Transparency

Still, the new House disclosure rules could threaten Murtha’s old-school way of doing business. Forced to disclose earmark sponsors and amounts this year for the first time, the subcommittee chairmen were put in a position of explaining a great deal about how the process benefits some lawmakers more that others — even if many details of the process remain in the dark. Murtha was in no mood to make transparency easy.

In reporting earmarks, all Appropriations subcommittees separated their list of project sponsors from information about dollar amounts. Though the information was published, the method made it impossible to quickly assess who got how much in each bill. Murtha took the extra step of marbling the projects and their dollar values throughout the committee report on the bill, rather than compiling an easy-to-read list.

“I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the agreement,” said Republican Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who is identified with $750,000 in earmarks and says he seldom seeks them.

Lawmakers say the winners in the process thrive on their ability to keep the rest of the rank and file in the dark about the distribution of money for special projects.

Murtha is no exception.

After a recent House vote, he stopped for a moment in the lobby adjacent to the House floor, just steps from his corner, to take a question from a reporter about the difficulty of piecing together which members got how much money for which projects in his bill.

Murtha answered abruptly before walking away. “So, you have to work,” he said. “Tough shit.”

Gaps Along Racial Lines

The Morris Museum on the edge of northern New Jersey’s horse country is engaged in a $15 million fundraising drive to benefit its collection, which includes music boxes, a model railroad and contemporary ceramics.

Disparities Show in Average Allocations: Click here to view chart

The museum is housed in a mansion built by the grandfather of Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen , New Jersey’s senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who has done his part by securing a $250,000 earmark to help kids learn about the music boxes.

Fifteen miles away, in the Newark suburb of Irvington, a few dozen kids of ages 7 to 14 routinely attend an after-school tutoring program called Safe Haven, which keeps them off the crime-saturated streets. Ten-term Democrat Donald M. Payne sought a $500,000 earmark to help Safe Haven expand its services; he was allocated $100,000.

Frelinghuysen’s mostly white district is the second-wealthiest in the country. Parts of Payne’s mostly black district haven’t fully recovered from the 1967 riots.

Frelinghuysen is credited with $45.1 million in earmarks spread across the House-passed appropriations bills for fiscal 2008. Payne is listed as the sponsor of just under $3 million.

Frelinghuysen is the ranking Republican on the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee. Payne serves on the Education and Labor panel and Foreign Affairs, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health.

Earmarks are not seen or used as a method for redistributing the nation’s wealth. They are not federal spending based on need. In fact, one of the arguments for earmarks is that lawmakers know their own districts best — and where the money would be put to best use.

But by one straightforward measure, the distribution of earmarks to white versus minority members, there is a clear disparity. Of $4.2 billion in earmarks sponsored by an individual member and included in bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, white Democrats average a total of $12 million in special projects, while black Democrats get, on average, a bit over $6 million per member. The average for Hispanic Democrats is a bit less than $6 million.

And even though their party took control of the House this year, black and Hispanic Democrats on average also did worse than members of the minority did. Republicans average $8.7 million in special projects.

“It’s an age-old problem for state and federal government, where African-Americans and Hispanics often represent many of the most underserved communities in the country,” said Democrat Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois, a member of the Appropriations Committee and himself the sponsor of $13 million in earmarks. “What’s worse is the historic inequities are often compounded because the same patterns recur year after year.”

No one familiar with the numbers suggests that black and Hispanic lawmakers suffer discrimination in the awarding of earmarks. Other factors — seats on the Appropriations panel, leadership positions, political alliances and close election contests — appear to determine who does best in the drive to get money for projects back home.

Nonetheless, many lawmakers, aides and congressional experts said they find the disproportionate distribution troubling.

“The neediest districts ought to do well in this process,” said Democrat Artur Davis , who represents a mostly rural Alabama district that stretches from Birmingham to the Mississippi line.

Davis is a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, but because his congressional seat isn’t in danger of flipping into Republican hands, he isn’t in line for the extra earmarks that go to the party’s politically vulnerable incumbents.

Half of the $2 million in special project money that Davis secured for his district — including Selma, where the “bloody Sunday” police riot happened in 1965 — is going to a tourist-attracting museum of voting rights. The fact that Alabama has a black representative is a testament to the success of the voting rights movement. That he gets such a tiny slice of the earmark pot is a reminder that his constituents have yet to achieve full parity.

Protecting the Vulnerable

Black and Hispanic Democrats expressed both surprise and chagrin at the earmark disparities in both parties. But many declined to speak about the subject on the record while their fellow lawmakers are still deciding which projects will make the final cut when House-Senate conference committees revise the spending bills.

“We need to be representative of the spirit of our party, which is a party of all people, with a sense of equity and fairness,” said one member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

But some minority members said new rules that require more complete disclosure of earmarks might shine a light on what they regard as a problem that needs to be fixed.

“If it comes to leadership’s attention,” said Linda T. Sánchez , a California Democrat, “the hope would be that they would take the necessary action to address the disparity.” Sánchez is listed as the sponsor of almost $5 million in earmarks, about in the middle range of earmarks to the Hispanic members of the Democratic Caucus.

Lawmakers, aides and lobbyists say the disparities can be attributed at least in part to appropriators giving extra money to colleagues who face tough re-election campaigns. The overwhelming majority of black and Hispanic lawmakers come from districts that are safely Democratic, and party leaders are reluctant to help them fend off primary challenges when money could go to keeping another seat in Democratic hands.

The tilt toward electoral vulnerability tends to cut against another factor that might benefit racial minorities: seniority. Many veteran black and Hispanic members don’t do as well as their more-junior white colleagues. Payne, for instance, is tied for 36th in party seniority but is tied for 183rd in earmarks among Democrats.

Likewise for Xavier Becerra of California, who represents the fourth-poorest district in the nation, as measured by median household income. Becerra, the only Hispanic in Democratic leadership by virtue of his appointed position as assistant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi , is tied for 57th in seniority but placed 230th among Democrats in special projects, with $1.3 million.

“It’s reasonable” to use political vulnerability as a criterion, said Democrat Ed Pastor of Arizona, a Hispanic member of the Appropriations Committee who is credited with almost $17 million in earmarks. “Needs of the district should also be considered.”

In Jackson’s view, however, only the latter should matter. “I think that most Americans would object to federal taxpayer dollars being distributed for political purposes,” Jackson said. “It’s inappropriate and wrong for the appropriations process in the House to be used as an arm” of the two parties’ political campaign apparatus, he said.

Another reason blacks and Hispanics are typically recipients of smaller amounts is that they get little help in the Defense spending bill, which carries more than half of the earmarked dollars that go to individual members.

Only four of the top 100 recipients of earmarks in that bill are black, and only four are Hispanic. White Democrats averaged $7 million in that bill, compared with $3 million for black and Hispanic Democrats. Even excluding the $167 million set aside for Defense Appropriations Chairman John P. Murtha , D-Pa., the average for white Democrats in the bill is $6 million.

Some black and Hispanic lawmakers don’t seek earmarks in the Defense bill because they think their districts won’t be able to take advantage of weapons programs. A third of the black and Hispanic members have no Defense earmarks at all.

Over time, however, that bill has become a vehicle for research that applies to the broader domestic economy. Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel , who is white, does not have a military base or a major defense contractor in his district, on Chicago’s North Side. But he received an earmark for $1.5 million in the Defense bill for research on traumatic brain injuries, an issue that came to his attention because political consultant David Axelrod has an epileptic daughter.

The Iraq War has made brain injuries an issue for the Pentagon. And Emanuel had another hook: The research for Axelrod’s Chicago-based Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy has a tie to Murtha’s home state.

“Thank God it was done at the University of Pennsylvania,” Emanuel said.

Some black and Hispanic lawmakers say cronyism that rewards friendship, commonality of background and familiarity with the system cuts against them in the awarding of earmarks.

‘It’s About Relationships’

Still, a few thrive in that environment.

Democrat Loretta Sanchez of California is one. She concedes that the earmarking process is political, but she doesn’t complain. She’s the sponsor of $9 million in earmarks, twice as much as her sister, Linda, and enough to place her fourth among Hispanics and 118th in the House.

“It’s about relationships. It’s about having good projects,” said Loretta Sanchez . “It’s about working with people to get the projects in.”

Of the 42 black and 20 Hispanic House Democrats, she is one of a handful who finished toward the top of the list of earmark recipients. Their success reinforces the notion that the reasons for disparity among white and minority lawmakers are complex.

Majority Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the only black member of the Democratic leadership, is the sponsor of $46 million in earmarks. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia, the only black Defense appropriator, is credited with $40 million.

Still, many black and Hispanic members are frustrated by what they see as an impenetrable game in which insiders do well at the expense of the outsiders.

For instance, Payne came to Congress six years before Frelinghuysen, but he had to scrap to win his seat and cannot claim the same legislative pedigree. Payne eventually waited for the retirement of longtime Judiciary Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. to retire before he became the first black House member from New Jersey.

Frelinghuysen, however, is the sixth member of his family to serve in Congress. He essentially inherited his seat on the Appropriations Committee after being elected to succeed his political mentor, Dean Gallo, who died just before the 1994 election. Frelinghuysen made his way onto the Defense subcommittee, from which he gets two-thirds of his earmarks.

Frelinghuysen did not make public his list of earmark requests, but considering his level of success, it’s hard to imagine that he had many rejections. Payne, on the other hand, watched as most of his requests were denied. In the Labor-HHS bill, for example, he was allocated $575,000 out of $30 million in A-requests, including one jointly sponsored project.

Not all of Frelinghuysen’s earmarks have gone to benefit his more well-to-do constituents. In 2003, upset by the “disgraceful conditions” at Washington, D.C., school playgrounds, Frelinghuysen used his power as chairman of the now-defunct District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee to funnel $5 million to the city’s schools for repairs and improvements.

And the Morris Museum, which is slated to benefit from his request in the current round of House earmarks, has a program financed by corporate and foundation donors that reaches out to underserved children and pays for food and transportation. “We try very hard to even the playing field,” said Betty Heinig, the vice president for institutional advancement.

A few miles away, in Irvington, Dawn Martinez, executive director of the Irvington Neighborhood Improvement Corporation, said she could expand the Safe Haven program by adding space and enrolling more children, if she had more money.

But Martinez isn’t complaining that Payne’s request for her program wasn’t fully granted. She said she understands that many programs serving needy communities get no earmarked money at all.

“These are the lucky kids,” she said.

The Rules of the Game

By most measures, Rep. Corrine Brown is an unlikely candidate to end up on the winning end of the earmarking game.

She’s not on the Appropriations Committee and has no position in the party leadership, other than chairing a subcommittee with some jurisdiction over railroads and pipelines. Her operating style is generally described as acerbic, combative and partisan. And she holds a pretty safe House seat: She was first elected in 1992 to represent a C-shaped North Florida district that was drawn to add another black Democrat to the state’s delegation, and she had no Republican opponent in her past two re-election contests.

And yet Brown outperforms most of her colleagues when it comes to steering federal dollars back home. She emerged as a savvy earmarker two years ago, when she used the rewrite of surface transportation law to secure tens of millions of dollars for road and transit projects in Orlando and Jacksonville. And this year, as newly required disclosures of appropriations earmarks show, Brown is the sponsor of 11 projects totaling more than $7 million in the House-passed fiscal 2008 spending bills — more than what’s attributed to three-fifths of all her colleagues, and two-thirds of the other members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

SAVVY PLAYER: Brown has lined up $7 million in projects for her district this year. (GETTY IMAGES / ALEX WONG)

“Different members emphasize different things,” said Brown, who was an appropriator during her decade in the Florida Legislature. And winning earmarks, she said simply, “is a priority for me.”

Asked to reveal the details about how she pursues that priority, however, Brown offers little beyond proclaiming the importance of understanding the system and following its rules, including meeting deadlines for submitting requests and establishing a record of hearing testimony and other supporting information to buttress the case for each project.

Such reticence points to another truth about the world of congressional earmarks. No matter how clearly and precisely each parochial pet project is linked to a sponsor or group of sponsors — the stated objective of the new “transparency” rules written this year — the process for winning such earmarks remains purposefully complex and opaque, requiring the successful lawmaker to have a detailed understanding not only of the stated procedures, but also of the unwritten rules and codes of conduct for currying support from the Appropriations Committee.

Looking for that advantage is important because the overwhelming majority of requests for earmarks are rejected outright: The committee received almost 33,000 applications this year, and there is money in the House bills for only a fifth of them. And many of those in line to receive some funding were in search of much more.

The Chosen Few

The difference between winning and losing, in many cases, is not whether an earmark has merit but what kind of political muscle it has behind it. Child-advocacy programs in Alabama, Virginia, New York, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are up for funding next year, but the program in Tampa that freshman Florida Democrat Kathy Castor tried to help was turned down flat. Senior citizens’ centers in districts around the country are in line for earmarks, but not the two that counted on Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper to be their champion. Some YMCAs will be flush with federal cash if the House bills are enacted. Others come up dry.

Just a few decades ago, “pork barrel politics” played out informally in only a few of the Capitol’s back rooms, where a handful of chairmen had the power to secure votes for their bills by adding in hometown projects for wavering members.

The terms “earmark” and “pork” do not appear in the index of “The Job of the Congressman,” the 1970 book by the legendary Democratic Rep. Morris K. Udall of Arizona. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter went to war with fellow Democrats in Congress over 18 water projects in what was then known as the public works bill. Back then, there were far fewer earmarks, but they tended to have much larger price tags, giving the members who secured them an unimpeachable claim to having done something meaningful for their constituents.

In the past three decades, as power in Congress has become more diffuse and procedures more democratic, rank-and-file members have been expecting more and more of what the power players get. Party leaders, who want to maintain broad constituencies as a means of holding power, have capitalized on those longings and turned an informal system into an institutionalized earmark industry.

The promise of earmarks — and the threat of withholding them — has become one of the most powerful tools party leaders use to build legislative coalitions and enforce party discipline.

Now that the contest for dollars is an institutionalized game, almost all the members play, and everyone who plays gets at least something. Only 11 House members are not credited with any individual earmarks this year — all of them Republicans who are vocal critics of the system. Among them are Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and chief deputy whip Eric Cantor of Virginia. Three of these 11 lawmakers are listed as joint sponsors of special projects, however.

The Big Three

An examination of earmarks in the House bills shows that, in general, Democrats and Republicans reward the same sorts of lawmakers with the most earmarks: appropriators, party leaders and politically vulnerable incumbents. Details about earmarks in the House-passed bills were compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit budget watchdog group, and then analyzed by Congressional Quarterly. This analysis focused most closely on the distribution among Democrats because, as the party newly in charge of the House this year, they set the parameters for the spending bills and promised to make their decision-making more overtly apparent.

By all accounts, most lawmakers spend a significant portion of their own time, and make sure their aides do likewise, trying to win as much for their districts as possible. But the rules of the game are not equally clear to all of the players. And they are not the same for each of the dozen appropriations measures.

A little bit of inside information, such as advance word about which programs in which bills will be more open to earmarking — or how to tailor a request for a project so that it might be funded out of a seemingly unconnected account — can go a long way toward a big return. The Defense bill, for example, has been used to fund research into breast cancer and epilepsy. “Those are things you’ll never get from a caucus meeting or a freshman-orientation meeting,” said one lawmaker who, like many colleagues, declined to be identified while discussing the inner workings of the system.

Successful earmarkers also learn the importance of good relationships with members of the Appropriations Committee staff, who handle requests and are most likely to have the last word with the subcommittee chairmen who take the lead in writing the bills.

But the biggest advantage, other than holding a seat on Appropriations, being an elected party leader or nearly losing your last election, is having friends in high places. For example, three close associates of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — George Miller , Mike Thompson and Anna G. Eshoo — are all from safely Democratic Northern California districts. And none of them sits on Appropriations. But each is the sponsor of more than $10 million in earmarks written into the House bills — better than most members of their caucus.

Do’s and Dont’s

The flip side of that equation is that rubbing colleagues the wrong way can mean less money for your constituents than you might otherwise expect to get. Democrat William J. Jefferson has been ostracized by his peers since being indicted on federal corruption charges earlier this year. And his hurricane-battered New Orleans constituents would get just $850,000 combined in the fiscal 2008 bills.

“A lot of it is based on relationships,” lamented another lawmaker who declined to be identified. “The bottom line is the neediness of our districts has to be a factor that goes into play.”

Veterans of the process say the failure of some lawmakers to formally submit their requests or follow the basic bureaucratic procedures required by the Appropriations Committee can doom them to light hauls. Some members waste their energy seeking earmarks for farm projects, for example, because they are not aware that the Agriculture spending bill is open to a handful of “new starts,” the euphemism for earmarks that have never received congressional blessing before. Others may not know that Defense earmark requests must have the support of a program officer at the Pentagon.

This year, applicants for Defense earmarks were supposed to start the process by submitting an electronic form to a secured Appropriations Web address.

The form included fields for staff contacts, other members who support the project, the name of the project and its description, whether the White House included the project in the Pentagon’s fiscal 2008 budget request, the perceived benefit to the Pentagon, how much money the program has gotten in the past five fiscal years, the amount requested in the current year, and the name of a Pentagon program officer who supports the funding.

Any incomplete or ignored answer could kill a project — as could the failure to follow up in person with the panel’s chairman, Pennsylvania Democrat John P. Murtha , or with the subcommittee staff.

But not necessarily. This year two Republicans, Bob Inglis of South Carolina and Tom Latham of Iowa, were able to secure earmarks in the bill despite accidentally identifying lobbying firms, rather than their clients, as the ultimate recipients of the dollars.

One member who did poorly this year suggested that party leaders publish a primer on how to work the process. But there is little incentive for earmark winners to enlighten their less-successful colleagues on the finer points of gaming the system.

“ Eddie Bernice Johnson is my best friend, but I never discuss appropriations with her,” Corrine Brown said of another Democrat who’s not on Appropriations and was first elected in 1992 from an absolutely safe seat — and who’s credited with just $800,000 in earmarks for her Dallas district.

“We’re going after the same thing,” Brown says of the limits of her friendship. “It’s a competitive thing.”

FOR FURTHER READING:

House adopts new earmark rules, CQ Weekly, p. 125; Republicans force accelerated disclosure, p. 1848; Senate adopts new rules, p. 2368; current status of fiscal 2008 appropriations, pp. 2856, 2882; earmarks and lobbying, 2006 CQ Weekly, p. 1606; a sampling of earmarks, 2004 CQ Weekly, p. 332.