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Pennsylvania communities lost millions of dollars in federal funding this year after a congressional standoff forced lawmakers to pass a short-term spending bill that stripped out all Community Project Funding grants for fiscal year 2025.
The continuing resolution, approved in March, kept the government open but zeroed out funding for local infrastructure that had already been vetted and was believed to be approved by some of the recipients. For communities in the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos, that meant losing support for police equipment, flood control, emergency communications upgrades and a major opioid interdiction and prosecution initiative in Monroe County.
Monroe County Commissioner John Christy said he believed the county had secured more than $2 million for an antiopioid task force designed to help prosecutors and detectives track drug distribution networks and pursue “death by delivery” cases. That funding request had been submitted last year by U.S. Rep. Susan Wild and jointly supported by Rep. Matt Cartwright and Sen. Bob Casey, both of whom, like Wild, lost their campaigns for reelection in November.
Then, suddenly, it was gone.
Christy told WHYY News that he learned of the cuts only after months of assuming the money was on its way.
“We thought the money was coming,” Christy said. He learned otherwise when former U.S. Rep. Wild, who had championed the project. The county confirmed it with their federal contacts.
Christy described the loss as a serious setback to their effort to combat the spread of illicit opioid distribution in a region that serves as a channel to the New York drug trade and where overdoses account for hundreds of deaths each year.
“That money would have paid for the investigations and prosecutions that came out of them,” Christy said. “If you are able to work backwards to find where the source of the opioid came from, it helps exponentially by removing it from the streets.”
Wild’s office had submitted Community Project Funding requests for 15 projects for the fiscal year 2025 federal budget for the area — a mix of public safety upgrades, county initiatives and law enforcement tools that she said had broad bipartisan value. She was surprised to learn only after she left office that they hadn’t been funded.
“It was very disheartening,” she told WHYY News. “Once something has passed through appropriations and been approved and the recipient has been notified, it’s my understanding that it’s pretty unusual to have it be rescinded.”
Wild only found out when another recipient contacted her directly, asking whether the former congresswoman could help them find out when funding would arrive. Wild soon contacted appropriations committee staff to find that none of her requested funding was included in the March continuing resolution. She began calling other project recipients herself — including Christy — to deliver the news.
Community Project Funding requests are typically included in an annual budget, consisting of a collection of appropriations bills, referred to as an omnibus bill. However, the fiscal 2025 omnibus was never passed, the result of a budget impasse that led to the short-term continuing resolution adopted to avert a last-minute government shutdown.
CPF: the new earmarks
Community Project Funding, or CPF, is the U.S. House’s modern, heavily regulated version of what used to be known as earmarks — the member-driven spending requests that Congress eliminated in 2011 after years of criticism and several high-profile corruption cases.
Earmarks fell out of favor after lawmakers used them to steer federal dollars to dubious or politically connected projects, sometimes benefiting campaign donors or, in a few cases, leading to criminal charges. The most infamous example was the “Bridges to Nowhere,” $500 million in earmarks for sparsely populated Alaskan areas that became a national symbol of pork-barrel excess.
After Congress banned earmarks, they lacked a system that allowed local communities to request federal funding through their representatives. That changed in 2021, when House leaders reinstated member-directed spending under the new CPF framework, which imposed strict transparency and ethics rules designed to prevent past abuses.
For example, each member of Congress is limited to 15 projects and they must certify that they have no financial interest in any of the requests. All requests must be published online, including the project description and the legal recipient. Committees vet applications against narrow criteria, and the House Appropriations Committee can reject projects that don’t meet federal standards.
Only public bodies and nonprofits may apply, so the focus has been on public safety, infrastructure, emergency services and environmental or flood-mitigation projects — the kinds of local capital needs that often fall between the cracks of federal formula funding.
Wild said that the process to obtain CPF financing is arduous, which added to her frustrations.
“These weren’t partisan projects,” Wild said. “There’s a long negotiation process to get them and to get your money or to get your application approved. [Applicants] have to back it up with all different kinds of paperwork, and it’s not a small deal.”
Christy said the county had staff to help get their application set up and the process took months, adding to the county’s own costs.
“Part of that was because of the increasing requirements of the federal government that were being placed on any federal dollars that were being spent,” he said. “So if you have federal dollars … you need to have processes and people in place to make sure that the money is being spent correctly and that it is the audience that you’re supposed to be going after.”
