Tracing the legislative history of annual appropriations can be challenging. There are 12 annual appropriation bills (assigned to each of 12 House Committees with oversight over a particular component of the federal budget). Often, these bills are combined into omnibus bills, and continuing resolutions to extend the time to enact a budget are not unusual. Finding the legislative history of an enacted omnibus appropriation requires disentangling the bill into its original parts, as committee hearings, reports, and markups generally relate to the individual bills.
For more information about the appropriations process, please see the following reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS):
There are several tools available to assist in tracking both individual and omnibus appropriations bills, as well as continuing resolutions and supplemental appropriations:
It can also be exceedingly useful to seek out compiled legislative histories or to use commercial databases, such as ProQuest Congressional, to identify component bills and their related committee materials.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has published several reports detailing the procedures for "earmarks" in the House and Senate:
For identifying earmarks requested by members of Congress, both the House and Senate provide research tools:
Rule XXI, clause 9, of the Rules of the House of Representatives requires the committee report accompanying each appropriations bill to list the earmarks and the individual Members who requested them.
