Revitalizing a run-down park along the Delaware River in Phillipsburg. Building a new community center in Plainfield. Preserving Lucy the Elephant, the iconic landmark of the Margate boardwalk.
All of these New Jersey projects, as well as hundreds more, were originally set to be funded during last year’s government funding process, but after Republicans in Congress opted to pass a year-long stopgap bill instead of a proper appropriations package, they got left out. Now, with another government funding deadline on the horizon, New Jersey’s lawmakers are trying to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen this year.
According to a New Jersey Globe analysis of FY2026 appropriations legislation, New Jersey’s 12 representatives and two senators have secured $268 million in community project funding, better known as earmarks, that will be delivered directly to local infrastructure projects, nonprofit groups, universities, and police and fire departments. That’s probably an undercount, since some funds requested by Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim are part of Senate appropriations bills that haven’t been released yet.
See here for a full list of FY2026 New Jersey earmarks, or scroll to the bottom of this article for a PDF version.
The government funding process this year, however, has become deeply fraught and politicized, leaving those funds in limbo. Earmarks are traditionally only approved as part of bipartisan appropriations packages, and Republicans and Democrats are miles away from coming to any kind of deal right now; even Republicans’ two-month continuing resolution (CR), which passed the House last week, has run into fierce opposition from Democrats, raising the prospect of a government shutdown.
(A CR is a form of stopgap bill that essentially keeps the government funded at current levels for a set period of time, typically with the purpose of giving Congress more time to negotiate full-year appropriations bills; most CRs, including the one that the House passed last week, don’t include earmarks.)
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) – whose district has $19,271,000 in funding at stake, more than any other representative from New Jersey – said that he still strongly supports the earmark process, and that he believes Speaker Mike Johnson does as well.
“I’m going to really fight hard for [earmarks],” Van Drew said. “It makes a huge difference, and I think it’s really important in our districts… As a conservative, I believe it’s much better for the member of Congress who should be representing their people to make the decisions about where money goes rather than a bureaucrat.”
But Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), who sits on the House committee that wrote the funding bills in the first place, said she’s worried that earmarks will once again get left out as Republicans barrel ahead with their funding plans.
“I certainly know that we cannot depend on the New Jersey Republicans to stand up for what’s right,” Watson Coleman said. “They can talk a big game, but they don’t work that game.”
Earmarks have long been one of the primary ways members of Congress are able to directly deliver money for local programs and projects – and, more cynically, boost their own political profiles with government money. Widespread abuse of the earmark system led Republicans to discontinue them after retaking the House in 2010; Democrats brought them back in 2021, but with new guardrails to prevent members from pouring money into their own projects or into “bridges to nowhere.”
During last year’s government funding process, however, the earmark process got derailed when Republicans funded the government for an entire year using CRs, none of which included earmarks. Some Republicans, among them Van Drew and Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), held out hope for getting the earmarks approved in a standalone bill or as part of a different funding package, but that never came to pass.
“There was so much else going on around that,” Van Drew said, explaining why the push for last year’s earmarks didn’t make headway. “And that may happen again. But this time I think we have to focus on it more.”
Instead, members had to roll over many of the projects they intended to fund in FY2025 into the new FY2026 funding process. Of the $268 million in earmark funding that’s been promised to New Jersey for FY2026, $158 million – nearly three-fifths – is dedicated to projects that were originally slated to be funded last year.
Presumably, that means other projects that might have been funded this year had to be pushed off to make way for last year’s projects. Watson Coleman also said that members were limited in what kinds of funding they could request, herding them towards certain projects and away from others.
“We were only able to supply a fraction of the projects,” she said. “There are a lot more infrastructure projects than there are social program projects, and I tend to want more social service projects to be included in my list, but we were constrained by where they told us we could look for money.”
Of course, the debate over government funding has implications for New Jersey that go far beyond a few hundred million dollars in earmarks, money that represents a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government spends every year. When Congress more broadly chooses to fund federal projects and agencies – or chooses not to fund them – New Jerseyans feel the impact.
For example, Democrats have sounded the alarm that House Republicans’ Energy Department appropriations bill takes a hatchet to federal beach replenishment funds, which aren’t specifically localized to New Jersey but which inevitably have an outsized impact on the state’s long coastline.
“Towns in my district and in red and blue districts throughout our country alike depend on replenishment to prevent damage from coastal storms,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) said on the House floor in protest of the bill. “It’s that simple. And we can’t let a bunch of climate denying Republicans in Congress gamble with New Jersey or with other coastlines.”
Therein lies a key problem for Democrats. The earmarks process is a bipartisan one, without overwhelming favor towards one party or the other; while Van Drew’s district is set to get more earmark funding than any other in New Jersey, second and third place belong to Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) and Watson Coleman, both Democrats.
But the appropriations process itself, especially in the House, has become far more partisan, and Democrats are unlikely to support conservative Republican-drafted bills even if they want to secure the earmark funding that’s attached to them. And while House Republicans can pass funding bills on party-line votes, the same isn’t true in the Senate, where some Democratic votes are needed to break a filibuster.
Ultimately, congressional Republicans may turn to the same solution they resorted to during the FY2025 process: passing another year-long CR. That would put earmarks on the chopping block once again, but Van Drew said he’d still try to get some funding approved.
“I see a real possibility of a one-year CR,” the congressman said. “If that happens, then we want to get some of those things in there.”
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