Critics of earmarking object that it remains a relatively closed process that adds billions in spending directives, often over the objection of the president and Cabinet departments.
Democrats made earmark reform a priority when they took over Congress in January. The Senate passed rules making it easier to identify the authors of the once-secretive practice.
Clinton supported those basic reforms, but she and other Democratic senators running for president balked at a proposal by Obama that would have required members to disclose their proposed earmark requests, not just those that were enacted into law.
Clinton aides said she ranked high on the Senate earmark list because she made a deliberate, early decision to use the practice to help economically stagnant upstate New York. She believes in earmarks, aides say, as a way of efficiently helping her constituents and challenging priorities set by executive branch bureaucrats.
"Hillary Clinton wanted to master earmarking and be master of the internal as well as the external game of politics," said one New Yorker who advised Clinton after her election, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss her political activities.
"She came to Washington admiring Chuck Schumer for his ability to deliver, particularly for upstate New York. Since then, both of them have been in a kind of competition, working the system furiously," the former advisor said.
Because of her perch on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton has been able to earmark $1.4 billion for defense contractors in New York state since she arrived in the Senate, including $140 million this year, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. Her record of home-state defense earmarking on that panel is second only to that of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who is chairman of the committee and has served in the Senate since 1979.
Clinton has raised more than $270,000 for her campaigns from defense companies with New York operations that have received federal money with her help.
Reform advocates such as McCain have been particularly critical of military earmarks, saying they allow lawmakers to replace defense priorities with personal, parochial and electoral priorities.
"The system is corrupt," McCain said at a recent campaign stop in California. "To think anything else ignores the way in which it has spiraled out of control. . . . It is disgraceful and it has got to stop."
