On May 28, 2026, a conservative anti-spending group called Citizens Against Government Waste handed out one of its regular awards. The group calls it "Porker of the Month," and it is not a compliment. It goes to officials the group says have "shown a blatant disregard for the taxpayers."

The winners that month were Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and Chuck Fleischmann, the Republican who represents Tennessee's 3rd District.

For Fleischmann, it was the third time.

He won it in August 2023. He won it again in May 2024. And he won it a third time this past May.

Every time, for the same reason: he takes more earmark money than anyone else in the House of Representatives.

What an earmark is, in plain English

An earmark is when a member of Congress writes a specific project in their own district into a spending bill. Not a formula, not a grant program anybody can apply for — a line that says this much money goes to this project here.

Congress banned the practice in 2011, in the middle of the Tea Party wave. It brought earmarks back in 2021 under new rules.

Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. That is the panel that writes the Department of Energy's budget. He is, in other words, one of the people holding the pen.

The numbers

Here is what the watchdog group found this year, in its own words:

"Rep. Fleischmann received 15 earmarks costing $251,378,000, the most in the House of Representatives. Rep. Fleischmann's earmarks included $213,000,000 for the Chickamauga Lock on the Tennessee River, the largest single earmark in Congress."

The largest single earmark in Congress. Not in Tennessee. In Congress.

Two years earlier it was the same story with bigger numbers. For fiscal 2024, the group reported that Fleischmann pulled in $273.3 million — a 855.6 percent increase over the $28.6 million he had secured the year before, and nearly 90 percent more than the second-highest member of the House.

The group's president, Tom Schatz, put it bluntly at the time: "Rep. Fleischmann is robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned money for his own parochial purposes."

That is not a Democratic attack line. Citizens Against Government Waste is a conservative group whose entire reason for existing is cutting federal spending. It is the same worldview Fleischmann campaigns on.

He used to agree with them

Fleischmann came to Congress in the 2010 wave, when running against earmarks was the whole point.

Here is what he said about it in 2014, in a quote the Chattanooga Times Free Press pulled out and put at the top of an editorial about his earmark record:

"I inherited a broken system. ... The first thing I did [when first elected in 2010] was we put a moratorium on those terrible earmarks."

Those terrible earmarks.

The paper's headline for that piece was "Fleischmann moves from vocal foe of earmarks to top of list for House members." That was two years ago. He has stayed on top of the list since.

This isn't about a lock

Let's be clear about what the actual problem is here, because it isn't the Chickamauga Lock.

The lock is real infrastructure. It's old, it needs replacing, barges move real freight through it, and a Tennessee congressman fighting for federal money to fix a Tennessee waterway is a congressman doing his job. Federal spending on things people need is not a scandal on this site. It's the point.

The problem is that Fleischmann does not apply that standard to anybody else.

The same congressman who secured the largest earmark in the entire Congress voted for Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025 — the bill that, in Tennessee, is expected to strip health coverage from at least 110,000 Tennesseans, cut an estimated $7 billion from TennCare over ten years, and leave nine rural hospitals at risk of closing.

That same bill took food assistance away from families. About 696,100 Tennesseans rely on SNAP every month, and Fleischmann was one of the Tennessee Republicans who voted to cut it.

Two weeks later, on July 18, 2025, he voted for the measure that pushed through the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the law that cancelled $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting, including the money that keeps small public radio and TV stations on the air.

Nine billion dollars was too much to spend on public broadcasting and famine relief. Two hundred and thirteen million for one lock in his district was not too much to spend.

The pattern under it

There is a version of this where a member of Congress says, honestly: I believe the federal government should spend money on infrastructure and on people, and I'm going to fight for my district's share of both. That's a defensible position. Nobody would write this post about that member.

Fleischmann's position is the other one. Spending is waste when it puts food on a family's table or keeps a rural Tennessee hospital open. Spending is an investment when it runs through the subcommittee he chairs.

He is not alone in this. We've written about Aaron Bean, who founded the DOGE Caucus over the national debt and then voted for the bill that grew it, and about the Elon Musk cost-cutting operation that expired on July 4 with no final report and no proven savings while the members who cheered it went quiet.

What makes Fleischmann's case different is that he isn't just voting with the crowd. He is, by a conservative watchdog group's own count, the single biggest beneficiary in the House of the exact practice he was elected to end — three separate times, publicly, with his name on it.

And when a reporter asked him last year whether he would ever hold a town hall so constituents could ask him questions like this one in person, his answer was "never".

Source

Citizens Against Government Waste, "Citizens Against Government Waste Names Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann May 2026 Porkers of the Month", May 28, 2026. Photo: Official congressional portrait, 119th Congress.