Congressionally Directed Funding (Earmarks)

Congressionally directed funding — commonly called an earmark, and referred to in current House and Senate practice as Community Project Funding or Congressionally Directed Spending — is federal money that Congress routes to a named recipient, project, or narrowly defined topic area through appropriations bill text or accompanying report language, rather than leaving the recipient selection to the funding agency’s own competitive, peer-reviewed, or formula-driven process. For research administrators, the practical significance is twofold: it changes how the award is likely to be structured and monitored, and it triggers a distinct set of federal anti-lobbying restrictions that apply to how the recipient institution can use its federal award funds in connection with seeking or continuing that funding.

What Makes an Award “Congressionally Directed”

The defining feature is where the recipient-selection decision is made. In a standard competitive grant, Congress appropriates a lump sum to an agency or program, and the agency then selects recipients through merit review. In congressionally directed funding, a member of Congress requests — and an appropriations committee report designates — a specific institution, project, or topic area for a defined dollar amount, functioning much like a non-competitive grant or discretionary grant from the recipient institution’s perspective, even though the underlying legal instrument (grant, cooperative agreement, or contract) may look identical to a competitively won award once issued.

Since the House and Senate lifted their roughly decade-long earmark moratorium beginning with fiscal year 2022 appropriations, both chambers have required more transparency around this process than the pre-2011 era: requesting members must publicly disclose the recipient, amount, and purpose of each request and certify they (and immediate family) have no financial interest in it, and each chamber caps how much of an appropriations bill can be devoted to directed spending. The underlying legal mechanism — Congress naming a recipient in lieu of an agency competition — is unchanged; what changed is the disclosure and certification layer wrapped around it.

Anti-Lobbying Restrictions That Apply to Recipients

Institutions that receive, or are actively seeking, congressionally directed funding operate under restrictions that do not attach to ordinary competitively won awards in the same way, because the very act of requesting a directed appropriation involves engaging with Congress:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1913 (the Anti-Lobbying Act, originally enacted 1919) prohibits using federal appropriated funds to pay for personal services or communications intended to influence a member of Congress, or any government official, to favor or oppose legislation, an appropriation, or a ratification — without express congressional authorization for that specific communication. It applies most directly to federal employees and officials, but its logic — that appropriated dollars cannot be recycled into lobbying for more appropriations — is the backdrop for the recipient-facing restriction below.
• 31 U.S.C. § 1352, the Byrd Anti-Lobbying Amendment, is the statute that binds grant and cooperative-agreement recipients directly. It prohibits using any appropriated federal funds to pay a person to influence, or attempt to influence, an officer or employee of any federal agency or a member/employee of Congress in connection with the awarding, extension, continuation, renewal, amendment, or modification of a federal contract, grant, loan, or cooperative agreement. Any entity that requests or receives a covered federal award above the statutory threshold must file a certification that it has not made, and will not make, such payments using appropriated funds — and must separately disclose (on Standard Form LLL) any lobbying on the award that was paid for with non-appropriated funds, such as unrestricted institutional or foundation funds.
• 2 CFR § 200.450 operationalizes the same restriction on the cost-allowability side of the Uniform Guidance: costs of lobbying activities are generally unallowable charges against a federal award, so an institution cannot simply charge Byrd Amendment-prohibited lobbying to the grant’s indirect or direct cost pool instead of paying for it with appropriated funds directly.

The practical effect for a sponsored programs office: a research institution can legitimately educate its congressional delegation about its research portfolio and can pursue a directed-funding request through non-federal funds and properly disclosed activity, but it cannot use current federal grant or contract dollars — direct or indirect — to fund the lobbying effort that seeks the next earmark, and any lobbying paid for with other institutional funds in connection with a covered federal award must be disclosed, not just avoided from the federal cost pool.

Why This Matters for Sponsored Programs Administration

Congressionally directed research awards are still federal awards once issued — they carry the same Cost Accounting Standards, Single Audit, and Uniform Guidance obligations as a competitively won award of the same instrument type. What differs is the front end: there was no agency merit-review competition to document, the award may arrive with report-language conditions specific to that line item, and the institution’s own advocacy activity around the request needs its own compliance trail (certification, SF-LLL disclosure where applicable, and a clear separation between allowable non-federal advocacy funds and unallowable federal award funds) that a purely competitive award never requires.

Related Terms

• Non-competitive grant
• Discretionary grant
• Cooperative agreement
• OMB Compliance Supplement
• Single Audit (US)