The New York Times’ Ron Nixon reports on “soft earmarks,” a phenomenon where members of Congress implicitly tells federal agencies to allocate money to pet projects. An ethics reform law passed last year forces all hard earmarks—explicit directions by a lawmaker to direct money toward project X—to be disclosed. But the soft earmarks—which rely on inserting language into spending bills like “endorse” and “urges”—put pressure on a federal agency to do the lawmaker’s bidding, or risk losing funding. The State Department, USAID and otheer agencies that run foreign aid programs have been particularly susceptible to this below-the-radar spending. Read Nixon here. MB

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