How Republicans rail against government spending on TV — only to brag about its benefits back home

• Rep. Mike Garcia touted $14.9 million in federal funding that he brought to his district this year.
• But most of it came from a must-pass spending bill that he and other Republicans voted against.

It was late December 2022, and Republicans were furious about the 2023 omnibus spending bill, a sprawling piece of legislation designed to avert a government shutdown and keep federal spending flowing for the next 9 months.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia had dubbed it the "omnimonster." Kevin McCarthy, then the speaker in waiting, even pledged to block the bills of any senator who voted for it. In the end, just 9 Republicans voted for it, only 2 of whom remain in Congress.

Republicans who voted against the bill cited the nearly $1.7 trillion price tag, disagreements with the process through which the bill was produced, or their preference that the matter be punted until their party officially assumed control of the House just days later, when they would have more leverage to enact their preferred policies.

Rep. Mike Garcia of California, a member of the House Appropriations Committee that oversees government spending, was among those Republicans.

"I'm voting no on this bill, obviously," Garcia said in a Twitter post at the time. "It's too big, it's too expensive, we can't afford it as Americans."

Garcia also made that argument — protesting not just the size of the bill, but the haphazard way that it was thrown together — in a floor speech and in an interview on Newsmax that week.

'Delivering results'

Just over half a year later, a mailer from Garcia's congressional office landed in mailboxes across his congressional district, which covers northern Los Angeles county.

The announcement: Garcia had brought home nearly $15 million in federal spending to the district.

"As a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, I work hard to secure critical funds for our community every year," the mail reads.

$2 million for a nonprofit that aids the homeless. $1.5 million for the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. $1.1 million for traffic cameras in Lancaster. These were among the projects that Garcia touted in the mailer generating positive local headlines in the process.

"Congressman Mike Garcia was absolutely instrumental in securing these dollars specifically to support the Connecting to Success program," Kathy Norris, the President and CEO of the Valley Industrial Association, told a local outlet after her organization received $675,000 in federal funding.

Yet almost all of the funding that Garcia touted in the mailer came from the omnibus spending bill that he made a show of voting against the previous December.

Specifically, $12.9 million of the $14.9 million came from Community Project Funding — known colloquially as "earmarks" — that ended up in the 2023 omnibus.

Congressional documents from December 2022 confirm that Garcia requested that funding, even though he ultimately voted against the bill that delivered it.

The other $2 million, allocated to College of the Canyons for an aircraft technician training program, came from the annual defense authorization bill, which Garcia did support.

Taken together, it's one example of a phenomenon that Democrats in particular have dubbed "vote no, take the dough" — referring to when Republican lawmakers and other officials celebrate government funding or programs that they actually voted against.

In recent years, there have been a wide litany of other examples.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law, nonetheless celebrated billions in broadband funding that it brought to his state. Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, who voted twice against a veterans' benefits bill, encouraged his constituents to sign up for a resulting program. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, who also voted against the 2023 omnibus, recently posed with a giant check that was funded by that bill.

Spokespeople for Garcia did not return Business Insider's request for comment, but in the past, Republicans have generally argued that when it comes to earmarks, they can have it both ways.

"I can celebrate this victory because I fought for it and put my name on this Community Funding project," Salazar told BI, even as she blasted the underlying omnibus bill for bringing "reckless spending for an already bloated federal government."

Garcia wasn't the only Republican to secure earmark funding in the 2023 omnibus, only to vote against that bill — in fact, over 100 Republicans did the same thing, according to Roll Call.

And Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who secured nearly $20 million from the omnibus bill, also voted against it, citing the bill's funding of the Department of Homeland Security and an increase in military spending.

Yet the case of Garcia and others appears to undermine one claims made by proponents of earmarks — that they can encourage lawmakers to take tough votes for major bills, or at least be less willing to tank legislation that stands to benefit their district.

In this instance, Garcia was able to secure almost all of what he requested for his district — just two of his earmark requests for Fiscal Year 2023 were denied, according to congressional documents — but that didn't stop him from ultimately trashing the bill.