Members Of Mass. Congressional Delegation Request $100 Million For 'Community Projects' U.S. Representative Katherine Clark has asked Congress to earmark $4 million to connect commuter rail to subways and buses at the Wonderland station in Revere. Flickr The nine Democratic members of the U.S. House from Massachusetts have requested a total of nearly $100 million in federal funding for local projects, ranging from education and human services to drinking water and climate resilence. During periods of Republican control over the last two decades, the House has banned earmarks for local projects, provisions often secretly slipped into the spending bills. The practice gained a bad reputation for funding wasteful, self-serving projects that were labelled pork, a name drawn from the barrel of meats that was passed around to slaves. Some campaign donors were suspected to have traded contributions for earmarks.