Russ Vought, former President Donald Trump’s White House budget director president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), and Tom Jones, American Accountability Foundation (AAF) President, will launch the “Congressional Pork Map” accountability project on Thursday, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
Vought and Jones’ goal is to expose Republican and Democrats’ most “corruptive” earmarks and hold lawmakers accountable for their lobbying for pork in various bills.
The AAF and CRA project aims to hold Republicans and Democrats accountable for stuffing legislation with special interest projects.
The Congressional Pork Map project serves as an interactive map so that Americans can see where lawmakers added earmarks to their districts. Further, the project allows constituents to add info about the projects to expose potential interests at play with the earmarks.
Vought said in a statement Thursday that the American people have a right to know if their representative is pursuing “wasteful and corruptive” pet projects. He said:
Earmarks are a conduit for overspending and erode the boundaries of our federal government, which are already far out of control. Americans have a right to know what politicians are doing with their tax dollars and expose wasteful and corruptive pet projects. PorkMap goes a step further by allowing taxpayers to hold their own elected officials accountable and bring earmarks into the open.
The Pork Map project also contains detailed reports on earmarks exposing “some of the leading and most problematic earmarks requested by Congress,” including:
- Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) $2,458,649 to Wenatchee Valley College will go to provide “student support services” for “white privilege” education, Black Lives Matter “propaganda,” and “DREAMers,” or illegal aliens.
- Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) proposed $400,000 in federal taxpayer dollars for the Cranberry Research Station.
- Rep. Henry Cueller (D-TX) requested $5,000,000 for a bridge to Mexico.
- Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) proposed $645,000 to a beautification effort to replace lamp poles because Grijalva wants to “provide for a consistent style along the roadway.”
- Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) requested $300,000 to put urinals in women’s restrooms in a theatre in Seattle, Washington, to “provide restrooms accessible to transgender and gender non-conforming people.”
- Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) proposed the $7,750,000 “U.S. Sheep Experiment Station ARS Infrastructure Improvement” to facilitate grazing lands and sheep industry genetic research.
House Republicans and Democrats brought back earmarks this congressional term after then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ended the practice in January 2011 after Republicans back the House majority during the Tea Party movement. House Republicans voted ten years later, this term, to overturn the House GOP’s ban on earmarks.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said in March 2021, “We’ve got $30 trillion in debt, and people are tired of the swamp. And the GOP should be ashamed of itself if it jumps headfirst right back into the swamp.”
Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak called the House Republican vote to restore earmarks a “betrayal of the voters,” which undermined one of the remaining “legacies” of the Tea Party.
Next week, the House will finalize requests so that Republicans and Democrats could quietly adopt earmark requests. However, AAF and CRA’s Pork Map will continue to track every earmark requested by Democrats and Republicans.
Jones said, “Pork Map is a tool that will allow local activists to understand who is requesting earmarks and where the wasteful projects are in their communities so they can hold their elected officials accountable.”
Check out the Pork Map project, which launches Thursday.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.