Higher Ed | Daily Report

Members of Congress have submitted their 2011 requests for earmarks – federal money that lawmakers direct to organizations of their choice.

Flickr photo by cliff1066Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland

Requests are not a guarantee of funding, but they offer a peek at what projects might receive appropriations funding in the fiscal year that begins this October. More than 100 of the members' requests would funnel cash to California colleges and universities, which stand to reap hundreds of millions of dollars for special projects, according to a review of lawmakers' disclosures.

An analysis by the the California News Service found that Democrats in the state requested $7.5 billion for the coming year, an average of $220 million per member.

Members of Congress posted their earmark requests on their websites in recent weeks as part of a 2009 reform aimed at increasing transparency. The U.S. House Committee on Appropriations website has a complete list of disclosures.  

Earmarks have been the subject of considerable controversy because they allow lawmakers to please their constituencies and they circumvent the traditional competitive process for distributing federal funds. The California News Service summed it up as follows:

Earmarks have become a flashpoint in the debate over balancing the federal budget. Fiscal conservatives decry the spending as wasteful, while supporters say earmarks are necessary to direct federal spending to worthwhile projects.

Last year, universities and colleges raked in a little under $2 billion in congressional earmarks, Inside Higher Ed reported this week. The website also includes a searchable database of the 2010 grants. California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed told Inside Higher Ed that his institution's earmarks "have been really good for the country."

Although the appropriations committee's 2011 earmarks website is not easily searchable, a quick survey shows that one of the biggest university-related earmark requests in California would benefit Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, asked for $41.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to fund the "aggressive clean up and demolition of sub-par facilities and allow for the development of new and more productive research and technology development infrastructure" at the Berkeley lab.

Appropriation requests for universities range in size and scope. They would fund programs in cybersecurity at San Jose State University, boost efforts to teach languages critical to national security in the CSU system and build a culinary arts demonstration lab at Cerritos Community College, for example.

Here's a look at some of the largest requests for California college projects that we found in the disclosures. Scroll horizontally to see who sponsored each request.