Before skipping town on Saturday for their August recess, the House of Representatives passed the Defense Appropriations Bill and the $3 billion worth of earmarks that came with it.

Once again members of the Appropriations Committee – and especially the Defense Subcommittee – were raking in bacon hand over fist. According to data compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense* (who deserve tons of credit for digging up the cost of these earmarks as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee didn’t disclose the cost in its earmark report):

• The 17 members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee pulled in $1,116,237,000.00 worth of earmarks, about $65,000,000 per member. That means four percent of the House received nearly 30 percent of the earmarks!
  
• The 66 Members of the full Appropriations Committee received $1,627,987,000.00 worth of earmarks, about $25,000,000 per member.
  
• Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was the only major member of the House leadership to not request any earmarks.
  
• Jack Murtha made requests for $166,500,000.00 worth of earmarks, Bill Young requested $143,200,000.00, and Jerry Lewis requested $109,000,000.00, a grand total of a whopping $418,700,000.00!
  
• Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Hoyer, Majority Whip Clymer, and Minority Whip Blunt secured $136,200,000.00 worth of earmarks – an average of about $35,000,000.00 for each of them.
  

You can see what this breakdown looks like by clicking on the image below:




To see the breakdown of Defense earmarks by state* click on the image below, and to see the breakdown per member*, click on the image below that.








*This data doesn’t match up with the summary data provided by TCS. That’s because I’ve included all earmark requests made by those members, while TCS appears to have only included earmarks on which those members were the sole sponsor. As such, some earmarks are counted more than once.