Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) directed the most concentrated recent earmark haul — 85% of his $251M FY2026 total to one Army Corps lock project

Summary

By far the most concentrated recent case is Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee, representing Tennessee's 3rd District (Chattanooga area). In both the FY2024 and FY2026 appropriations cycles he was the top House earmarker by dollar value, and in each case roughly 85-87% of his entire earmark total went to a single recipient/project: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Chickamauga Lock replacement on the Tennessee River, built by prime contractor Shimmick Construction. FY2024: $236.8M of his $273.3M total (86.7%). FY2026: $213M of his $251.4M total (84.7%) — the single largest earmark of any member of Congress in that cycle. On the Senate side, the largest single recent earmark by dollar concentration into one project is Sen. Patty Murray's (D-Wash.) $190M for the Howard A. Hanson Dam (Army Corps, shared credit with Sen. Maria Cantwell), though at roughly 39% of her larger $484.7M full-cycle total it is far less concentrated than Fleischmann's.

What "earmarked spending" means here, and a caveat on "recipient"

Since FY2022, Congress revived earmarks under the names Community Project Funding (House) and Congressionally Directed Spending (Senate) after an 11-year moratorium. Members request specific line-item projects; the requesting member(s) and dollar amount are published when a bill is marked up. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) compiles these into its annual Congressional Pig Book, the most complete public per-member earmark database (its criteria for what counts as an earmark are somewhat broader than Congress's own — e.g., it flags items lacking any member attribution).

For large infrastructure earmarks like the Chickamauga Lock or Howard Hanson Dam, the formal "recipient" of the appropriation is a federal agency (the Army Corps of Engineers) executing a specific, geographically fixed project in the member's district — the money then flows to a construction contractor (Shimmick Construction, for Chickamauga) — not a private company or individual directly named as grantee. That is a genuinely different flavor of "concentration" than a member directing $10M to one university or nonprofit, but it is the dominant pattern behind the largest concentrated-dollar figures in recent cycles, because Army Corps navigation/flood-control megaprojects are the single biggest line items available to earmark, and members who chair the relevant subcommittee (as Fleischmann does for Energy-Water) can keep re-funding the same project year after year.

The clearest case: Fleischmann and the Chickamauga Lock

CAGW named Fleischmann its "Porker of the Month" in both May 2024 and May 2026 specifically for this pattern. The Chickamauga Lock is a decades-long Army Corps navigation project near Chattanooga (started 2002-04): a new 110-by-600-foot lock chamber to replace an 83-year-old lock suffering "concrete growth" (alkali-aggregate reaction). Total project cost has swelled to roughly $954 million as of an April 2023 Army Corps briefing to the Inland Waterways Users Board, up from an original sub-$300 million estimate, due to funding delays, COVID-era inflation, and contractor cost overruns with Shimmick Construction. Fleischmann has championed it for over a decade (jokingly calling it "the Chuck Lock") and, as Energy-Water Subcommittee chairman, controls the bill that funds it — he secured $191M for it as far back as FY2021, and the House passed full FY2026 funding for it (H.R. 6938) on a 397-28 vote in January 2026.

Other members in FY2026 who similarly rode one or two mega Army Corps earmarks into the top ranks (as joint requests, so less concentrated relative to each individual's own total, and credited proportionally by CQ Roll Call): Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa., $214M total) and Chris Deluzio (D-Pa., $202M total), largely from a shared $183.8M for the Montgomery Lock and Dam on the Ohio River; and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La., $450.6M) with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and, in the House, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Clay Higgins (both R-La.), sharing $131.5M for the Army Corps' Morganza-to-the-Gulf hurricane-risk-reduction project in coastal Louisiana.

Broader ranking context (who tops the overall earmark-dollar lists)

Ranked purely by total earmark dollars (not concentration), the picture differs, because senators face no 15-project cap and often spread earmarks across dozens of smaller projects rather than one dominant one:

• FY2024: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Senate Appropriations ranking member — 231 earmarks, $575.6M (most of any member, but highly dispersed, not concentrated); Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — 185 earmarks, $466.4M; Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) — 186 earmarks, $453.6M; Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) — 114 earmarks, $428.6M; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — 227 earmarks, $421.7M. Fleischmann was the top House member at $273.3M / 13 earmarks (already highly concentrated, per above).
• FY2026: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Senate Appropriations ranking member — 96 earmarks, $484.7M across all bills, the most in Congress (CAGW's "Whole Hog Award"); Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) close behind at $483.7M (including $70M for a University of Louisville bioscience center and $45M for an air traffic control tower at Fort Campbell); Sen. Susan Collins ranked 4th at $420M. Fleischmann again led the House at $251.4M / 15 earmarks. Reschenthaler ($214M) and Deluzio ($202M) ranked 2nd-3rd in the House; Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla., $120M, including $17M for University of Oklahoma airport improvements), Commerce-Justice-Science Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), Transportation-HUD Chairman Steve Womack (R-Ark.), and Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) rounded out the House top 10.

Structurally, both cycles show the pattern GAO and CRS describe: earmarking power concentrates heavily among the roughly 90 members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees (about 17% of Congress), who received an estimated 35-42% of total earmark dollars in FY2024.

Note on figures across two sources/vintages

CQ Roll Call's February 2026 tally (post-enactment of most bills) put Murray's Energy-Water-bill total at $244.7M and noted $272M in FEMA/Homeland Security earmarks were still unresolved; CAGW's May 2026 Pig Book, published after those bills cleared, shows Murray's full across-all-bills total at $484.7M (96 earmarks) — the two figures are not in conflict, just different vintages/bill scopes, and both are cited below so the reader can see which bills each total covers. Fleischmann's Chickamauga figure ($213M/$251.4M total) was already final and consistent between the July 2025, February 2026, and May 2026 sources.

Data gap disclosure

AskAmerica's own warehouse (the fiscal.usaspending_* tables, including usaspending_recipients_by_district which does rank top recipients per congressional district per year) tracks federal award spending by district and by recipient, but it carries no congressionally-directed-spending/earmark flag or member-attribution field — a catalog search for "earmarks"/"directed" returned zero table or column matches. USAspending's underlying award data mixes earmarked and non-earmarked federal spending together with no way to isolate the earmarked share from SQL alone, so this answer relies entirely on the two organizations that manually compile and publish per-member earmark attribution by reading the appropriations bill text itself: Citizens Against Government Waste's Congressional Pig Book (the most complete public earmark-by-member database) and CQ Roll Call's independent bill-text analysis (used for the FY2026 House/Senate rankings and joint-earmark credit-splitting detail). No number in this report was computed from an AskAmerica SQL query; all dollar figures are read directly from the cited primary/secondary sources.