The Department of Me: Senators Earmark $636M for Universities They Attended

Most universities dream of wealthy alumni who will send massive donations to their alma maters. The kind who contribute millions of dollars year after year, funding libraries, laboratories and more.

A select few universities have found such a wealthy, if unwitting, donor for 2026: the U.S. taxpayer, by way of pork-hungry senators.

Twenty-four senators requested $636 million of earmarks for the universities they attended as students. That’s more than 20% of the $3.7 billion of earmarks requested for universities in the 2026 federal budget, according to Open the Books’ review of congressional disclosures.

The list includes 13 Democrats and 11 Republicans. However, it was Republicans who requested $470 million (74%) of the cash.

The average alma mater earmark request is worth $4.9 million this year. Earmark requests for universities that are not affiliated with a senator were worth only $3 million on average.

Not every earmark request will be signed into law. Congress has been discreetly adding and removing earmarks from the proposed budget for weeks, presumably in an effort to appease members who were hesitant to advance the budget out of committee.

Regardless, senators on both sides of the aisle are trying their best to gift federal funds to their old schools.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville
7 earmark requests worth $164.9 million

McConnell’s image as the quintessential fiscal conservative has long clashed with his massive earmark requests. His school spirit has been central to that conflict, ever since he came under fire for using $750,000 to open the University of Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell Center for Distance Learning in 2003.

In 2010, McConnell changed course and supported a ban on earmarks led by Sen. Tom Coburn. He even continued to oppose earmarks for a few years after the ban was lifted in 2022, but he is back to his old ways in 2026 as he prepares for retirement.

No senator requested more money for a college than the $100 million McConnell earmarked for the University of Louisville this year. It would fund four medical research initiatives.

McConnell earned his bachelor’s from Louisville in 1964. He opened the school’s McConnell Center in 1991, which selects 10 high-school seniors every year to receive a scholarship and enter the McConnell Scholars Program. Louisville also features the McConnell-Chao Archives, an exhibit “built around the lives and careers” of McConnell and his wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao.

McConnell also earmarked $65 million for the University of Kentucky, where he graduated law school in 1967.

Unlike in some past years, McConnell did not request funding for Western Kentucky University’s Mitch McConnell Integrated Applications Laboratory.

Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV)
Marshall University
9 earmark requests worth $57.5 million

When Justice was the richest man in West Virginia with an empire of 70 coal mines, he was able to donate $5 million of his own money to Marshall University, the school where he earned his bachelor’s degree and Master of Business Administration.

His wealth declined over the next several years due to debt and environmental liabilities. By 2025, he was reportedly worth “less than zero,” according to Forbes.

Luckily for Marshall University, the cash kept flowing. It just came from taxpayers instead of Justice’s bank account.

As governor of West Virginia, Justice used $10 million of federal funds meant for Covid-19 recovery to buy Marshall a new baseball stadium. The state’s Senate Committee on Finance later asked the federal government to investigate potential legal and ethical violations surrounding the move.

Justice also signed a bill sending $45 million of state money to Marshall University for a cybersecurity program.

Now, the second-year U.S. senator is doing the same at the federal level. Justice requested money for new medical school buildings, high-performance computing upgrades, airplane pilot training and more at Marshall.

Three of the nine earmarks Justice requested for Marshall are worth $10 million or more. He did not request an earmark worth more than $7.5 million for any other school.

There’s even $1.5 million to “increase grant writing and project development capacity,” helping Marshall to secure more money in the future.

Coincidentally, Justice’s financial struggles opened the door for someone else to claim his spot as the richest man in West Virginia: Marshall University President Brad Smith.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Washington State University
2 earmark requests worth $50.9 million

Even before Murray’s legislative director Lizzy Letter visited Washington State’s Office of Federal Relations in June 2025 for a full-day tour, Murray had submitted a huge earmark request for her alma mater.

The money for construction and scientific research is more than Murray requested for every other school in Washington combined. She requested only $14.5 million for the University of Washington, which has three times as many students as Washington State.

Murray graduated from Washington State in 1972 with a degree in physical education.

Sen. John Boozman (R-AR)
University of Arkansas-Fayetteville
2 earmark requests worth $4.3 million

The $4.3 million Boozman requested for the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville — where he played football as an undergraduate — is less than many of his colleagues earmarked for their alma maters.

But he also requested $41 million for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, home of the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health. Fay Boozman, John Boozman’s late brother, earned his ophthalmology degree from Arkansas and later served in the state senate.

The medical sciences school has only 3,500 students. Boozman requested $16.7 million for Arkansas State University, which has 18,000 students.

Conclusion

The government will shut down on Jan. 31 if Congress cannot agree on a 2026 federal budget. Unfortunately for taxpayers, alma mater earmarks appear to be one of the few items that lawmakers from both parties support.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) introduced an amendment on Jan. 22 to strike all earmarks from the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill, calling them “partisan pet projects” that are “outside the core mission” of the bill.

He was unsuccessful. Seventy-six House Republicans joined 215 Democrats in voting to keep the earmarks intact. Another eight Republicans and one Democrat abstained. The results were unsurprising, given that 31 House members secured $131 million for their own alma maters last year.

Each one gets an “F” for fiscal sanity.

Click here to download the full list of earmarks for alma maters.