Earmarks — or what lawmakers these days prefer to call “community investments” — will return to South Carolina next week when the S.C. Senate takes up its version of the $15 billion 2026-2027 state budget that passed the S.C. House last month.
These controversial spending items, which essentially boil down to legislator-directed spending on in-district projects, can range from critical funding for local infrastructure to grants for community arts festivals. Earmarks have been called “pork-barrel spending” in recent years.
After watching earmark spending explode from $30 million in 2019 to more than $400 million in 2024, lawmakers eliminated the items entirely from last year’s budget, pledging to reform the earmark reporting system to make it more transparent and accountable before bringing it back.
With some of those changes now in place, particularly municipal oversight of earmarks given to local nonprofits, the Senate Finance Committee included a number of earmarks in its draft budget last week. Those spending measures — which include small items like a $20,000 grant for senior programming at a Newberry County Rosenwald School and major projects like millions of dollars for rural water and sewer upgrades — will be debated on the Senate floor when budget deliberations begin at noon April 21.
After passage in the Senate, the budget will return to the S.C. House, where members will then have an opportunity to add earmarks of their own.
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