Matt Stout and Samantha Gross, “$1.5m for a wedding venue and conference center. $250,000 for historic ships. Here’s what top Senate brass put into the budget.,” Boston Globe, May 17, 2024.

“It really is a fundamentally broken process where you have pet projects of specific legislators getting designated funding outside any kind of rationale or equitable analysis of whether or not that is a worthy use of public funds,” said Jonathan Cohn, policy director for the group Progressive Massachusetts. The approach, he said, means that earmarks are doled out “not based on need, but rather on power and proximity to power.”