Heading south on Main Street out of downtown Burlington, Iowa, traffic fades away well before drivers see the orange and white barriers. Locals know the Cascade Bridge is closed. It’s been closed for over 16 years.
Money to repair the 129-year-old bridge has been hard to come by, said Deputy City Manager Nick MacGregor from about 60 feet below Main Street in the Cascade Ravine. He pointed out the rusted joints of the Baltimore truss system that landed the bridge on the National Register of Historic Places and said its closure is more than a practical problem.
“It’s a visual image of the inability to replace infrastructure,” said MacGregor. “So it’s definitely an important piece to get back as a functioning piece of infrastructure.”
Lifelong Burlington resident Deangelo Haley described how he and his friends used to cross the bridge to go to the Dankwardt Park pool.
“You can’t do none of that no more,” said Haley sitting in the park, where he took his kids to play on a sunny day in April. “It would be nice because my kids, they’re older, growing up, and now it’s kind of like history, like ‘I used to go across the bridge when I was your age,’ and now it’s gone.”
The future of the Cascade Bridge and hundreds of other projects across Iowa, Nebraska and other states is uncertain. President Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending proposal calls for $163 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending. That total is the source of Community Project Funding – commonly known as earmarks – which gives members of Congress some say in how billions of dollars should be spent to the benefit of their constituents.
After the appropriations process last year, those funds were eliminated from 2025 spending by a stopgap budget measure passed by Congress and signed by Trump in March.
“In a time of unified government with a second Trump administration, where the Trump administration is steamrolling Congress in many respects, I think that it's probably a good bet that Congress will once again be putting those earmarks on hiatus,” said Donna Hoffman, political science professor at the University of Northern Iowa.
Community Project Funding is a way for lawmakers to fund critical infrastructure and services in their districts and earn political points while they do it, Hoffman said.
The City of Burlington was on track to receive $6 million to reopen the Cascade Bridge in the form of federal CPF procured through the office of Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks with the direct involvement of the Republican congresswoman from Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, MacGregor said. Then her fellow House Republicans put forth a continuing resolution in March that would cancel nearly $16 billion in such funding for thousands of projects across the country.
Trump signed the bill into law after it passed largely on party lines, including “yes” votes from all seven House representatives from Iowa and Nebraska – six of whom had secured funding for projects in their districts.
In essence, six of the lawmakers voted against their own earmarks. Iowa lost out on about $96 million. In Nebraska, about $100 million got cut.
The Midwest Newsroom has confirmed that those same six lawmakers have requested CPF for fiscal year 2026. MacGregor said Miller-Meeks contacted him about re-submitting a request for the Cascade Bridge but did not disclose an amount.
A statement from the office of Miller-Meeks said that she voted for the continuing resolution to keep the government open, and she “will continue to fight for these vital projects that will benefit and protect IA-01.”
“A (government) shutdown would have hurt Iowans from all walks of life. And yet, 212 House Democrats voted to shut the government down as part of their vendetta against President Trump, despite all their previous declarations of how shutdowns hurt the most needy,” the statement reads.
The vast majority of CPF is for infrastructure projects, like the Cascade Bridge, funded through the Department of Transportation as well as Department of Housing and Urban Development initiatives.
But there are many projects that seek federal funds to improve communities by elevating their most vulnerable members.
Funding secured, funding lost
The case of U.S. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and a package of violence and intervention programs he championed illustrates how the CPF reversals are impacting communities.
Bacon has requested and secured funding for such programs in his state’s 2nd Congressional District for the past four years, including $527,000 for Encompass Omaha: A Hospital-based Violence Intervention Program in 2022. He requested another $533,000 for the Nebraska Medicine program for fiscal year 2025. The request paperwork from Bacon’s office reads: “...the project is an appropriate use of taxpayer funds because it will help victims of violent crimes improve their lives so they are not re-injured, killed or incarcerated.”
The program began in 2020 and is led by Dr. Charity Evans, chief of the Division of Acute Care Surgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She said that Encompass Omaha also has helped reduce violent crime in a city that reported its lowest murder rate in 35 years last year.
“This really is taking what we know about medicine and treatment of patients and applying it to violence as a disease,” said Evans. “If you came in and were having a heart attack, I wouldn't acknowledge that you had the heart attack and then just send you back out. I would tell you how to live better, how to live more healthy, what medications you need to take. I would address the problem at its root, as opposed to just fixing the physical component.”
To do that work, Encompass Omaha employs a team of two social workers, two violence intervention specialists, and a mental health provider who work alongside 20 trauma surgeons to help victims navigate out of the cycle of violence at various stages of their medical treatment and recovery.
The $533,000 request for CPF was supposed to pay for a year’s worth of salaries and expenses for a project that can save millions in the same time period, said Evans.
“We know that a gunshot wound, in hospital costs, is anywhere from $50,000 to a few million dollars,” she said, adding that hospitals must provide emergency medical care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. “So the savings in lives lost and income loss and taxes not paid… far exceeds the costs of prevention intervention.”
The requested amount for Encompass Omaha was roughly halved to $267,000 in the appropriations process and put into the FY2025 spending bill. In voting to pass the continuing resolution that eliminated CPF for the year, Bacon effectively voted to cancel those funds along with the more than $40 million his office procured for other projects in his district. In a written statement, the representative cited his reasons.
“I voted for this CR to keep our government open, which enabled us to plus up our military and defenses. This bill funds the historic pay raise for those who protect our country that came out of the Quality-of-Life panel I chaired and got passed through the FY25 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). It allows our military to start new contracts that will enable us to build new warships.”
Bacon added, “While I do not like CR’s, we cannot let the government shut down and not be there to serve the people.”
When asked if Trump’s proposed budget will have any effect on CPF in 2026, Bacon’s Deputy Chief of Staff, James Wright, said that the document is only that, a proposal and said that Congress still has the power of the purse.
“It’s suggestions, it’s guidelines, it’s informative material for the appropriations committees,” said Wright. “But Congress does what Congress does.”
Congress did what Congress did, said Hoffman, and CPF will not likely provide enough reason for the legislature to resist the president’s agenda to reduce federal spending.
“Community Project Funding is going to be very minor when compared to things that are likely coming down the pike such as Medicaid cuts,” said Hoffman. “And so far, Republicans have mostly wanted to avoid primary challenges from the right for being insufficiently MAGA where the concerns are national in scope, not local.”
A lifeline lost
If Congress lets the executive branch determine everything that goes into the FY2026 national budget, it would be the return of a similar arrangement from the not-so-distant past. Earmarks were reintroduced, rebranded as CPF, and capped at 1% of discretionary spending in 2021.
For a ten-year period starting in 2011, there was a moratorium on earmarks, pushed by critics who preferred the pejorative “pork” for spending they saw as wasteful or even corrupt. They pointed to would-be projects like Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere”, which secured a $223 million earmark in 2005 that was later rescinded, and Iowa’s “Coralville Rain Forest” project for which Sen. Chuck Grassley helped set aside $50 million in 2003, which was also rescinded. But even those projects had merit, according to Hoffman.
“If you are not benefiting from that community project, then you see it as wasteful, but you may not take into account the places where your community is benefiting from that community project funding,” said Hoffman. “One person's waste is another person's economic development project.”
It could be yet another person’s lifeline, said Andrew Allen. Before he was President and CEO of YSS in Iowa, he was a beneficiary of CPF initiatives. When Allen was 17, he suffered from substance abuse. After a drunk driving conviction, his parents sent him to the non-profit that provides support for at-risk youth.
“This is the organization that I credit with saving my life 30 years ago,” said Allen. “YSS provided life-saving support that gave me the foundation for the life that I've got today.”
YSS’s Iowa Homeless Youth Center was awarded $750,000 through the 2023 Department of Housing and Urban Development budget for an employment and skills-building project. With those funds, YSS bought six modified shipping containers and paid young people who are homeless or had aged out of the foster system $15 an hour to grow vertical hydroponic gardens.
YSS is also still waiting on $1.6 billion in CPF that was awarded for fiscal year 2024 to support the homeless youth in Des Moines between 16 and 24 years of age. The delay is normal, said Allen, citing the rigorous planning and monitoring that comes with CPF, but times are uncertain. He remains hopeful for those funds and the application YSS recently submitted to the office of Rep. Zach Nunn for 2026.
“The young people of Iowa are dependent upon much support, and our goal focused on youth is to be sure that these young people are given every opportunity for education, employment, safe housing, such that they don't become chronically homeless,” said Allen. “We're hopeful that the support remains and pushing forward with our plans, and it seems like budgets are being cut all over the place.”
In addition to the disappearance of a large source of funding, Allen and other project administrators who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom expressed concern that federal spending cuts will lead to increased competition for the public and private sources that remain. And state budgets are unlikely to make up for shortfalls – especially in Iowa and Nebraska, where state governments have cut income and property taxes in recent years.
CPF has no effect on the amount of money spent by the federal government, only where a small amount of that money goes. Shortly after the 2025 projects were approved by the appropriations committee, Miller-Meeks went to Burlington, Iowa, to celebrate the acquisition of federal funds to reopen the Cascade Bridge.
“They were all excited about the dollars,” said MacGregor from the Cascade Ravine. “It’s a big tax burden relief for us to have those dollars.”
Burlington resident and retired city utilities employee Bryan Humphrey said most people want the bridge back, but he doesn’t think it’s worth the $6 million in taxpayer money. He understands the cost-cutting mission of Republican lawmakers, if not its execution.
“It was just a photo op,” Humphrey said. “Then to come back later and not vote for it, that’s kind of two-faced in my opinion.”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here.
The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODOLOGY
For this story, investigative reporter Nick Loomis reviewed the Community Project Funding documentation for fiscal years 2022 to 2025. He then identified the requests put forward by congressional representatives from Iowa and Nebraska. He chose several projects from years past, as well as the cancelled 2025 funding, and spoke with administrators and beneficiaries of those projects. He made one in-person trip to Burlington, Iowa and conducted the rest of the interviews over the phone. He requested interviews with all congressional representatives from Iowa and Nebraska except for Iowa’s 4th District representative, Randy Feenstra, who has never submitted CPF requests. He was not granted interviews, but he did get statements from the offices of Don Bacon and Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
REFERENCES
What Are Earmarks and What Purpose Do They Serve? (Peter G. Peterson Foundation | Oct. 2023)
Congress Passes Continuing Resolution to Fund Federal Government Through Fiscal Year 2025 (The Council of State Governments | March 14, 2025)
Trump Releases FY 2026 'Skinny' Budget Proposal, Making Cuts to ED Programs and Eliminating FSEOG (National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators | May 5, 2025)
Vanished earmarks in stopgap law pose challenge to local projects’ return (Roll Call | March 24, 2025)
House GOP passes spending bill, sending plan to avert government shutdown to Senate (NPR | March 11, 2025)
Alaska's 'bridge to nowhere' plan finally scrapped (Reuters | Oct. 23, 2015)
Newstrack: Is group trying to bring rain forest to the Midwest still alive? (The Gazette | Oct. 26, 2015)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
