Earmarks for 2011

Every year, politicians from both sides of the aisle tack on billions of dollars in excess projects for their home districts, but without a way to search for these earmarks the average citizen is left to search through each and every bill.

Good luck. Fortunately, the folks at the Sunlight Foundation, with help from many others, have taken the time to go through and actually enumerate and record every single earmark for FY 2011 and put it into a downloadable database. We took that database and made this viz of total earmarks by state, which you can also switch (using the select measure drop down) to see earmarks per capita. The bottom line is that $130 billion is going to earmarks next year.

Click on the tabs on the top to switch to a view by politician. Also, make sure to switch the measure to earmarks per capita (in the center)- it really puts spending in perspective!