Congress Named 20,294 Projects. Only 16% of the Money Landed.

Since 2022, Members of Congress have designated roughly $39 billion by name for more than 20,000 hometown projects -- bridges, clinics, library renovations, water systems -- through Community Project Funding (the House's term) and Congressionally Directed Spending (the Senate's).▸ GAO, Congress's own auditor, whose job under the law creating this program is to track what happens to the money after Congress names it, reports that as of the end of fiscal year 2024, agencies had recorded obligations -- legal commitments to pay -- for about 61 percent of that $39 billion. But only about 16 percent had actually been outlayed: checks written, cash disbursed, money that reached a city, a nonprofit, a state agency.

The gap between those two numbers is the whole story.▸ In the federal budget process, an obligation is a legal commitment -- the government signs a contract or awards a grant -- while an outlay is the money actually moving: a check issued, funds transferred. An agency can obligate a grant the day the appropriation becomes law and then take years to actually disburse it, as the recipient works through design, permitting, and construction. That is normal for infrastructure money. What GAO's estimate shows is how early in that process most of this $39 billion still sits: about 45 percent of it -- roughly $17.6 billion -- is obligated but not yet outlayed, nearly three times the roughly $6.2 billion that has actually reached anyone, and another 39 percent, about $15.2 billion, hasn't even been obligated yet.

If this were simply a matter of construction taking time, the oldest money should be much further along.▸ It is barely further along. Isolating just the FY2022 and FY2023 tranche -- about $24 billion that has had one to two extra years to move -- GAO estimates agencies had obligated about 66 percent of it (about $16 billion) and outlayed about 23 percent (about $6 billion) as of the same September 2024 cutoff. That is five points higher on obligation and seven points higher on outlay than the full three-year, $39 billion pool -- a modest head start for money that is, on average, a year older, not the steep ramp-up a healthy pipeline would show. (These are separate populations measuring separate fiscal-year cohorts; GAO does not add them to the three-year total, and neither does this piece.)

GAO interviewed 167 recipients of FY2022-2023 funds and found 59 percent of those whose projects were moving forward had run into at least one problem in the year before the interview -- most often managing project time frames, wrestling with an agency's online payment or grant-management systems, or losing staff who knew the project.▸ One recipient told GAO their organization would not spend all of its designated funding because it was too hard to hire and keep the employees needed to manage the grant -- a labor shortage on the recipient's side, not a Washington bottleneck, quietly capping how much of an already-designated dollar actually gets used.

The bottleneck isn't only on the recipient side.▸ Sixteen of the 19 federal agencies that administer CPF/CDS funds told GAO they face challenges conducting oversight of these projects, and half of them -- 8 of 19 -- pointed specifically to federal staffing reductions. The Department of Energy, for instance, said a wave of staff resignations increased the workload for those who remained, who responded by leaning more on written correspondence instead of meeting with recipients. Four agencies said funding constraints forced them to swap in-person site visits for virtual ones. Fewer staff checking on more money in motion is exactly the condition under which a documentation gap or a stalled project goes unnoticed.

Most of this money isn't open-ended.▸ About 65 percent of FY2024 CPF/CDS funds carry a fixed window -- one to five years, depending on the appropriation -- during which an agency must obligate them; once that window closes, agencies generally have five more years to actually pay the money out, after which unspent funds expire and, five years after that, are cancelled and returned to the U.S. Treasury. The remaining 35 percent are 'no-year' money, available for obligation until expended, with no fixed obligation deadline at all. For most, though not all, of this $39 billion, there is a legal deadline built into the appropriations themselves -- not just an aspirational target. Congress designated zero new CPF/CDS money in FY2025 -- a one-year pause in new earmarks -- and GAO says it plans to review how FY2026 funds are implemented "in the future," without naming a date. Until then, the $39 billion already on the books is the whole program, and roughly $32.8 billion of it -- the unobligated and obligated-but-unpaid shares combined -- is still moving through it.