WASHINGTON–Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, leaders of the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, will meet with Republicans in Congress on Dec. 5 to discuss reducing the size of the federal government. Though few details of their plans have been released, members are divided on whether to scrap earmarks, a provision of the government funding process that has concerned fiscal conservatives for years.
Earmarks are provisions in Congress’s annual appropriations (government funding) bills that allocate taxpayer money to specific projects and locations, bypassing a merit-based competitive process normally required for government grants and contracts. Several fiscal conservatives in Congress, chiefly Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have long said that earmarking leads to wasteful spending and amounts to “pork” for local special interests….