Livonia, MI, July 27, 2026 – The Citizens Research Council of Michigan announced it has received the “Outstanding Policy Achievement” award, one of five annual honors presented by the Governmental Research Association (GRA). The Research Council was recognized for the breadth of its work on “Promoting Budget Reform: Legislative Earmarks.”
GRA is a national organization composed of research peers from 40 member organizations representing 17 states. The awards competition, judged by fellow GRA members, recognizes exceptional research and educational efforts by association members on state, regional, and local government issues.
This is the fourth consecutive year that Citizens Research Council has been honored.
The prestigious Outstanding Policy Achievement recognizes tangible improvements in public policy, management, service delivery, and/or cost savings resulting from the research and recommendations of a governmental research agency or an individual GRA member.
The GRA recognized the throughline between the Research Council’s work on state budgets and pork barrel spending and its subsequent policy recommendations to put new constraints on earmarking, aka “pork barrel spending,” in the state budget process.
Public frustration with the rise in legislative earmarking had been mounting, fueled by media stories revealing misuse of funding tied to specific large earmarks from the past year. In August 2023, after the Fiscal Year 2024 state budget was enacted, the Research Council published a Council Brief with recommendations to reform the process.
The Citizens Research Council’s analysis and recommendations helped set a framework for reforming the process, which was largely followed. Our analysis shed light on the widespread prevalence of completely unvetted “eleventh-hour earmarks.” Further, our recommendations emphasized the critical need for “front-end transparency” to ensure that all earmarks could be understood by lawmakers asked to vote on a budget bill. That helped short-circuit attempts to appease concerns with after-the-fact reporting.
A new Republican majority in the Michigan House for the 2025-26 session addressed earmark transparency and recommended House rule revisions that would largely meet our first recommendation. But without the related budget process reforms, those changes could be reversed at the whim of any future legislature. For this reason, we issued a second Brief in February 2025 urging the legislature to codify those front-end transparency reforms into state law. The bills enacted in November did just that.
“All of the entries in this category were excellent,” said Dr. Joe Adams, research coordinator for Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, on behalf of GRA. “As a group, we sided with the idea that policy achievement would require a sense of completion. Citizens Research Council appeared to achieve what they set out to do.”
The award was announced last week at the organization’s annual conference, held in Chicago. Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council, accepted the award on the Council’s behalf.
“For 110 years, Citizens Research Council has been Michigan’s go-to source for non-partisan, unbiased, objective research and public policy analysis,” said Lupher. “We are thrilled and honored to once again be recognized for our work, with this award particularly focused on our policy recommendations that led to tangible improvements for Michiganders.”
