Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lawmakers-use-line-items-to-fund-projects-for-own-districts Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript NewsHour Congressional Correspondent Kwame Holman reports on how Congress funds its own pet projects. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. KWAME HOLMAN: It's a fact that has fiscal conservatives furious. Federal spending has grown more under President Bush than under any other president since Franklin Roosevelt. And just two months before the midterm elections, it's become a big concern among the Republican majority in Congress.PAT TOOMEY, Club for Growth: The rank-and-file voters across America are disgusted with the level of spending. And if they don't show up in big enough numbers to return the Republicans to a majority, it will be because Republicans in Congress let them down. KWAME HOLMAN: Following his failed bid for the Senate in 2004, former House Republican Pat Toomey became president of Club for Growth, which promotes conservative ideas for economic expansion. Toomey says cluttering spending bills with special projects known as earmarks is not one of them. PAT TOOMEY: It used to be, back in the early '90s, in an average year, there would be a few hundred such projects, roughly one per member, on average $2 billion to $3 billion dollars.It's just gotten to the point where everybody has gotten very, very greedy. And now there's 25 or 30 per member. We reached 14,000 earmarks in a recent year, and it's $29 billion. It's no longer small change now, $29 billion in one year.