Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is seeking a $970,000 earmark for an obscure New York City fund that channels money to left-wing activist groups, while Republican Senators Shelley Capito and Jim Justice are wrangling for $25 million for a West Virginia airport that has less than one percent of the traffic as those in Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Those are two of more than 13,000 Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS) 2026 Senate requests formerly known as “earmarks,” the long-standing Capitol Hill practice of senators and representatives attempting to reap tax dollars for favored projects back home.

Most, but not all, lawmakers in both political parties participate in this process without worrying about an up-or-down vote by colleagues because the spending projects are buried in major appropriations bills that are unlikely to be voted down, especially in a high-pressure showdown like the current government shutdown. Once the government is re-opened, officials are likely to enact the big spending measures as quickly as possible.

Researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC),led by Senior Policy Analyst David Ditch, recently culled through mountains of documents and data to identify CDS funding “for groups whose core purpose is activism on behalf of left-wing crusades. Although specific projects funded for these groups might seem anodyne in isolation, the choice to funnel tax dollars through highly ideological non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is wholly inappropriate.”

Gillibrand’s earmark of nearly a million tax dollars for The Fund for the City of New York “has over $100 million in assets and was created by the leftist Ford Foundation, [to act] as a clearinghouse for ideological causes. It currently funds dozens of controversial partner organizations, including the Immigration Defense Project (IDP), which offers legal support and ‘advocacy’ for illegal immigrants and believes American law enforcement is racist,” EPIC reports.

The IDP describes itself as fighting “to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multi-pronged strategy, including advocacy, litigation, legal advice, training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.”

Meanwhile, West Virginia’s Capito and Justice want $25 million for the “generational modernization project at West Virginia International Yeager Airport to elevate the passenger experience and improve one of the oldest commercial terminals in the U.S.” Yeager handles between 16 and 24 commercial flights per day. By comparison, Dallas-Fort Worth services more than 2,000 daily commercial flights, and Atlanta’s Hershfield-Jackson will see up to 2,700 such flights, according to the two facilities.

Other earmarks that prompted questions from EPIC researchers include the $1 million sought by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to enable New York City’s Metropolitan Opera to install elevators for use by disabled patrons. The Metropolitan Opera has more than half a billion dollars in assets and “an annual budget of more than $330 million, meaning it can make room in the budget to ensure its elevators are accessible to people with disabilities,” according to EPIC.

Another Democratic earmark comes from Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who wants $2 million for Rady’s Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Rady’s has a center dedicated to pediatric ‘gender affirming care,’ including gender transition surgeries for minors,” reports EPIC. “They are committed to continuing to perform those surgeries even after the Trump Administration’s Executive Order ‘Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.’ The funds used for pediatric mental health will almost certainly go towards sponsoring the gender transition of children or at least free up other funds for that effort.”

In addition, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is after $2 million for “affordable housing” in the village that is home to 67 souls and known as South Naknek. The village “is so remote that children from the village must take a plane flight to go to school, and its population roughly halved between the 2000 and 2020 censuses.”

Final approval for these controversial spending measures is not quite guaranteed, as there is significant conservative opposition in the House of Representatives that could conceivably slow down or derail the earmark railroad during the upcoming conferences between the upper and lower chambers of Congress to iron out differences between their respective versions of the nine remaining major appropriations to be enacted for 2026.