For perhaps the first time in South Carolina history, members of the General Assembly will soon reconvene to pass a $14.4 billion state budget that’s more likely to be remembered for what’s not in it than what is.
In a word, earmarks. Or as most lawmakers refer to them, local investments.
Long controversial, this legislator-directed spending on special in-district projects — think everything from critical sewer system upgrades to local arts festivals — has skyrocketed in recent years, rising from a reported $30 million in 2019 to more than $700 million in 2023 and $400 million in 2024.
The timing of that explosion was no accident, budget experts say. Flush with federal Covid aid but facing conservative revenue projections due to pandemic job losses, lawmakers opted to spend its annual surpluses on one-time local projects rather than committing the money to long-term, year-over-year investments.
Over the same period, in response to Gov. Henry McMaster’s calls for greater transparency, lawmakers brought the once-secretive earmark process out in the open for the first time, requiring legislators to file their requests in writing and debate them openly on the floor.
But this March as lawmakers searched for money to cut the state’s top income tax rate from 6.2% to 6.0%, Senate Budget Chairman Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, and House Ways and Means Chairman Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, announced there would be no legislator-directed local investments in the 2025-26 budget.
Or as Peeler put it, the legislature was going “cold turkey” on earmarks often called legislative pork.
But in a series of interviews with the Charleston City Paper, policy experts and lawmakers of both parties made it clear that at least some of that spending is necessary for the health and welfare of state residents and will have to return in one form or another in 2026. The only questions, they agreed, were how much and under what rules and procedures.
Earmarks under fire
Sam Aaron, research director for the conservative-leaning S.C. Policy Council, says he’s “skeptical” of earmarks and the legislative process from which they spawn.
“Earmarks aren’t inherently bad, but a lot of them are,” Aaron said, noting that some have proven embarrassing to legislators and recipients over the years. “So, I’d say the pause this year is probably the right move.”
Greenville Republican Rep. Stephen Frank, creator of the S.C. Pork Project website and a member of the hardline S.C. Freedom Caucus, takes that criticism further.
“I don’t think every earmark is problematic,” Frank said, adding that he generally supports spending for critical items like local police and fire departments. “But I think it’s a bad system overall that creates more room, more opportunity, for waste.”
What’s worse, he argues, earmarks breed a culture of favor-trading among legislators that calls “corrupt.”
“It creates an environment where maybe I need $500,000 for my police department, but you have a project that’s near and dear to your heart that might not be as virtuous,” Frank said.
“Then, to get what I want, I might feel pressured to vote for what you want. And that’s just a bad way to fund core functions of government.”
Old infrastructure, new challenges
Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, says he supports further reform of spending for local projects, such as the establishment of a competitive local grants process. But he opposes this year’s decision to zero out assistance for poor rural communities like the areas he represents.
“Anytime you’re dealing with public dollars, there should be transparency and vetting and accountability,” Hutto said. “But there’s a way to deal with that without just saying we’re not doing it anymore.”
What some urban senators and representatives don’t understand, he argues, is most of the rural infrastructure that his constituents rely on was put in the ground almost a hundred years ago with federal dollars that flowed to S.C. as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
And that infrastructure — which small counties and towns could never tax themselves enough to replace — is starting to fall apart.
“It can’t be overstated,” Hutto said. “The time to upgrade that infrastructure is now and they just don’t have the money to do it.”
Moreover, he notes, these smaller communities typically depend on small, cash-strapped nonprofits to deliver basic services. That’s why a small state investment — to repair, say, a church kitchen — isn’t the kind of political payoff some city-based lawmakers might assume.
Instead, to that small community, it’s often an essential anti-poverty program.
“That’s a way we feed meals to people very much in need,” Hutto said.
The answer: Disclosure, debate and democracy?
Current Camden Mayor and former state legislator Vincent Sheheen has seen the earmark issue from every side during his years in public service. And perhaps befitting a man who just finished writing a book to be published in December about the workings of S.C. government, he talks about it like someone who’s given the matter some serious thought.
First, he says spending money for local projects is just unavoidable in a rural state like South Carolina, where most counties and towns are too small to fully support their own infrastructure.
“With the way our state government is structured, it’s absolutely vital that the state invest in local communities,” Sheheen said. “If you don’t have that, our communities, particularly small communities, will wither and die away.”
So the issue, he says, is how you’re going to make those dollars available at the state level. Unlike some, he believes that the current system, strengthened by further accountability and transparency, is probably the best option available.
“I’m a big believer in democracy and having fights on the floor with open debates and vetoes,” Sheheen said. “That’s the way our government was set up, and I don’t know why some people want to sidetrack it by shoving money into agencies or programs.”
In fact, he says, the greater danger would be if those dollars were quietly spent outside of public view by vast state agencies.
“The giant programmatic bureaucracies are a relatively recent phenomenon,” he said. “We don’t need to just give some agency a billion dollars and tell them to spend it. That’s not how our democracy was supposed to work.”
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