Earmarks for Long Island roads are back — if your representative agrees with you

As he presented a giant-sized check for $3.5 million to the Town of Huntington’s Highway Department last week, Rep. Nick LaLota (R-Amityville) repeated a threat, first made last month, that he would withhold similar future funding for East Hampton Town over its prohibition on police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Other municipalities should take notice, he said: "Choose the money instead of going broke, when [East Hampton] went woke." 

Congressional earmarks, the funding method LaLota is using, came back in 2021 after a decade-long pause over concerns about misuse. 

As LaLota’s decision illustrates, earmarks give individual members of Congress a lot of leeway to choose where the money goes, and where it doesn't, in their districts. Supporters say the system is designed that way because local politicians have a sense of local needs, but critics — especially fiscal conservatives — have long argued it leads to funding decisions based on political factors rather than need or merit.

Also known as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate, earmarks bypass traditional funding mechanisms like formulas (which, for roads, are based on factors like miles of pavement and traffic volume), or competitive grants that consider need. Instead, members of Congress select the projects, subject to approval by each body’s appropriations committee, with few restrictions. Earmarks can be for a range of purposes — this year, Long Island's range from roads to water treatment and flooding infrastructure, new police vehicles and grants for nonprofits — and the spending is capped at 1% of the federal discretionary budget.

Joshua Sewell, director for research at the Washington-based nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense, said even though earmarks are a small portion of the federal budget, the selection process is "a black box," which can lead to waste.

To the front of the line

Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said that even when earmarks go toward something useful, such as road repaving, they're not necessarily distributed fairly. For example, a legislator who obtains an earmark for roads in one town in their district doesn't have to demonstrate why that town is more worthy than any other town in their district.

They "are basically going ahead of the line of other projects," said Schatz, whose Washington-based group assigns colorful awards to lawmakers for what it considers wasteful earmark spending. (This year's "Congressional Pig Book" included a "Taxpayer's Nightmare at the Museum Award" to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a $1.5 million earmark for a new entrance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Sewell said lawmakers often favor some parts of their districts over others, but he couldn't recall an instance of a lawmaker explicitly making earmarks conditional on a local government law or policy as LaLota has done.

But Long Island’s representatives from both parties defended the earmark system.

"The focus is to bring money back to your district, and that doesn't always happen when it's going through ... formulas and things like that," Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), whose projects this year largely focus on water infrastructure, told Newsday.

LaLota said locally elected members of Congress are in a better to position to "understand the needs of the community and distribute those dollars equitably" than an "unelected bureaucrat in D.C."

Asked why he tied road funding to the unrelated issue of immigration enforcement, LaLota said it was because "we need to unwind this terrible [migrant] crisis that we're in the midst of."

More money for party in power

Though each House member is allowed to request up to 15 earmarks, the party in power often gets bigger-ticket items. This fiscal year, Long Island's two Republicans, LaLota and Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-Bayport), received about $50.8 million in earmarks, while Democrats Suozzi and Rep. Laura Gillen (D-Rockville Centre) together received about $31.7 million.

Earmarks are often promoted as filling gaps in traditional formula or competitive grant-based programs, bu t LaLota and Garbarino have allocated a significant portion — $19.25 million this fiscal year — toward road repaving projects, which do get funding through the traditional route s.

The repaving earmarks are going to four of the 10 towns (Huntington, Brookhaven, Smithtown and Islip) and three among dozens of villages (Massapequa Park, Bellport and Lindenhurst) in LaLota's and Garbarino's districts this year. Next year, they have requested even more repaving earmarks: about $45 million for seven towns and one village.

Suozzi and Gillen have not requested earmarks for road repaving in the current Congress, though Suozzi did earmark $2.5 million this year for flood mitigation along a road to a public beach in Glen Cove.

In contrast to earmarks, all municipalities are eligible for the state's four largest formula-based road aid programs, which together are providing about $51 million across Suffolk County and $46 million across Nassau County this year. The formulas consider factors like lane-mileage, government type and historical precedent to distribute state and federal dollars. 

While the criteria are more transparent, there are criticisms of this system, too. Municipal road departments across the state regularly complain that Albany does not put enough money into the formula programs; a 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found many states, including New York, share a relatively small proportion of received federal highway dollars with local governments. And a Newsday analysis last year found New York's road aid formulas tend to disadvantage suburban towns like Long Island's, though suburbs generally have a larger local tax base to draw on to fund their roads themselves.

Garbarino defended his road-paving earmarks in an email, saying roads are "essential for residents and local economies. ... Community Project Funding allows us to invest in projects our local leaders have identified as priorities that improve our infrastructure and make our communities better and safer places to live."

Andre Sorrentino, Huntington's highway superintendent, said LaLota's $3.5 million earmark this year is a significant boost to his department, which had a total budget of over $30 million last year, about $9.5 million of which was used for paving.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said she would not be intimidated by LaLota, who had previously submitted an earmark request for repaving 22 miles of the town's roads for next fiscal year.

"While we can disagree on the issues revolving around ICE, we fully expect Representative LaLota to honor any and all past and current commitments," she said in a statement.

EJ Fagan, a political scientist at the University of Illinois Chicago, said earmarks can be "useful" as a way for Congress to exert its independent power of the purse from the executive branch, but there’s nothing stopping members of Congress from attaching strings to the funding, such as cooperation with ICE.

"If that's how [LaLota] wants to choose how to allocate grants, that's how he can do it," Fagan said.