This article originally appeared in The Detroit News July 8, 2025.
State investigators’ recent revelation of ties between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office and Fay Beydoun sheds important light on how politicians and connected individuals abuse the budget earmark process. But the process itself is another abuse, as the Mackinac Center for Public Policy shows in an ongoing lawsuit.
The now-standard practice by which Lansing awards billions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations violates longstanding language in the Michigan constitution designed to curtail or prohibit this exact practice. Earmarks also insult our intelligence and run counter to plain dealing in public life, as you can see by reading the language used to obtain a $20 million grant for Global Link, Beydoun’s “business accelerator” that is at the center of year-long criminal embezzlement probe.
Instead of naming Beydoun or Global Link as the beneficiary, the last-minute earmark in the 2023 state budget reads like a game of Twenty Questions:
“$20,000,000.00 shall be awarded to an international business accelerator located in a city with a population of between 83,500 and 84,000 and in a county with a population of between 1,250,000 and 1,300,000 according to the most recent federal decennial census that supports the growth of the Michigan economy by attracting top international entrepreneurs to establish their companies in Michigan with a focus on next-generation medical services and equipment; agriculture; engineering, design, and development; and other technology-focused industries.”
Why all the circumlocution? Because coming out and saying the purpose and recipient of the earmark would violate explicit language in the Michigan Constitution that prohibits state spending for “local or private purposes” — unless the spending is approved by a two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers. In May, the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation sued the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, taking aim at two earmarks providing taxpayer money to baseball parks.
Michigan did not come lightly to its restriction on special district projects, commonly known as pork-barrel spending. This restriction was first included in the state’s 1850 Constitution, and it has been retained in all subsequent state Constitutions, including the current one. Minutes of the early 1960s convention that produced the current Constitution make clear that a large majority of delegates opposed pork-barrel spending out of concern over corruption, patronage and legislators’ desire to ingratiate themselves with influential constituents. The shenanigans we’re seeing in the Global Link case are not an unfortunate blot on the earmark process. They are the organic result of it.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation’s lawsuit seeks to restore a safeguard against public waste that has fallen into disuse in recent budgets. By writing narrowly tailored descriptions such as the one above, lawmakers can single out individuals for public largesse while skirting the clear language of the law.
The lawsuit will test whether this type of pettifogging is licit under the state constitution. But it is already clear that the earmark dodge goes against basic principles of openness and good government.
The Republican House is taking notice and has passed a requirement that lawmakers must go on the record when they request earmarks. That’s a step in the right direction, but Michigan’s Court of Claims must go further by ending the earmark dodge altogether. The language around pork-barrel projects looks shady because it is shady, and the framers included the anti-earmark law to stop this type of freebooting. Michigan taxpayers in recent years have shelled out for a curling club in Traverse City, a private distillery and an AFL-CIO jobs-training program.
There is a strong case to be made that none of these projects were worth the money. Michigan hands out more than a billion dollars in pork in this year’s budget, yet the state economy continues to underperform regionally and nationally.
Whether this spending is good or bad for the economy, it should be done in broad daylight. The state Constitution’s restriction on earmarks is unambiguous, and it was put there for clear and publicly acknowledged reasons. It is not a little-known codicil or relic of the legal code. It’s the law of the state. Legislators must follow that law, not try to extend patronage through clever write-arounds.
