Upon his return to the House Appropriations Committee after an 18-year hiatus, Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., has one central focus: fighting poverty in rural counties.
It’s been a longtime focus of Clyburn, 84, who is back on the committee after nearly two decades serving in leadership. His committee seniority continued to build during that leave, and he’s now the top Democrat on the powerful Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, which controls around $90 billion in annual spending.
As the longtime third-ranking House Democrat behind former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., Clyburn’s endorsement of former President Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign is widely considered crucial to Biden’s eventual win.
Amid heavy pressure on the party’s old guard to step aside after Democrats’ 2022 midterm losses, Clyburn relinquished his whip slot but retained a lower-rung leadership position until early last year. That opened up an avenue for Clyburn to reclaim his seniority on Appropriations in the 119th Congress.
In his new role, Clyburn is laser-focused on promoting one of his signature policies: the “10-20-30” plan that steers federal funding to impoverished communities. That program requires 10 percent of spending on rural development and other programs to be made in communities with “persistent poverty,” defined as counties where 20 percent or more of the population has lived below the poverty line for 30 years.
The formula was first used in the $840 billion 2009 economic recovery package, after Clyburn and others advocated to ensure the law spread its benefits around to all ethnicities and income levels. In that law, the Agriculture Department was required to allocate at least 10 percent of funds in three rural development program accounts to persistent-poverty counties.
Clyburn said his plan drew on lessons from the Great Depression, when Black Southerners were left behind by New Deal-era recovery programs.
“All those jobs they created did not go to Black people,” Clyburn said. “They were white only, in the South, and the only way to get those jobs was to go north. … So I said that we need to do something to make sure these communities, this time, benefit from the recovery.”
Clyburn pushed to have the program incorporated into annual appropriations bills, and he found a well-placed ally: then-Budget Committee chairman and future Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan read an essay that Clyburn wrote on the program and asked him to talk to then-House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky.
Rogers’ interest in the program piqued when Clyburn explained that most of Rogers’ eastern Kentucky district would qualify for funding under the program.
“He literally almost snatched the paper out of my hands,” Clyburn said. “He looked, he said, ‘Let me see that thing.’”
Rogers in a statement called Clyburn a “longtime friend and colleague across the aisle.” He said he and Clyburn “have worked in tandem to help protect our most vulnerable and impoverished communities in the country, specifically using the 10-20-30 program to fight rural persistent poverty. When rural America thrives, the entire country gains economic strength, so it is critical that we invest in areas most in need.”
The formula has survived intact, with a few variations over the years. In the fiscal 2025 appropriations bills, 14 accounts are required to follow the 10-20-30 formula, mostly USDA-run programs: the Rural Housing Service, Rural Business-Cooperative Service and Rural Utilities Service. EPA State and Tribal Assistance Grants also are doled out under the formula, among others.
Economic Development Administration funding via the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund also apply the formula.
A few Transportation Department programs don’t necessarily allocate 10 percent of funding to “persistent poverty” counties, but they rely on that term’s definition under federal law to ensure money goes to counties or equivalent jurisdictions, census tracts within counties as well as U.S. territories and possessions.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn’t currently have a 10-20-30 element to its programs, though Clyburn suggested that could change under his watch.
“If you’re going to make transportation safer and more secure for rural communities, that’s the Transportation subcommittee; if you’re going to make housing more affordable in these communities, that’s HUD,” he said.
Southern focus
Estimates vary, but recent analyses by the Census Bureau and Congressional Research Service pegged the number of persistent-poverty counties at between 341 and 414.
The persistent-poverty counties are largely in the South, with much of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina falling under the description, including much of Clyburn’s district. Appalachia, specifically West Virginia and much of eastern Kentucky, is also covered, along with scattered counties in the Midwest and Alaska.
The Census Bureau report found that over 80 percent of affected counties are in the South, including concentrations along the southwest border in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
“This is a program that attacks persistent-poverty counties, irrespective of who lives in them,” Clyburn said. “If you live in Appalachia, you are going to be white; if you live in Arizona or New Mexico, you are going to be brown; and if you live in South Carolina, you may be majority Black.”
Since the formula applies largely to programs that are aimed at addressing rural poverty, the Government Accountability Office found in a 2021 report that the provision “has not always increased the proportion of funding awarded to those counties.”
“The purpose of the 10-20-30 formula — to increase the proportion of funding awarded to persistent-poverty counties — could be better achieved by focusing its application on programs that do not already target such areas and which can provide meaningful assistance to economically distressed communities,” that report says.
The Census Bureau found that 15 states and the District of Columbia don’t have any qualifying counties, including the entire Northeastern region with the exception of Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York and Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania.
“We may need to expand [10-20-30] more, but I plan to make the case,” Clyburn said.
Spreading the benefits
Expanding the parameters of the program without changing the formula to touch some wider-ranging accounts could face some pushback from members who represent urban areas with high poverty rates, as those areas often are more geographically concentrated and are often in counties that would not qualify.
That’s partly why Clyburn worked with Rogers on a bill that passed the House in the 117th Congress that would expand the definition of “persistent poverty” areas to include more communities, including those with a 20 percent poverty rate for at least 25 out of the last 30 years, and apply the formula to more programs.
The measure passed the House in 2022 on a 258-165 vote, with 38 Republicans supporting it, including key players like Rogers, current House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma and the current speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
The Senate companion bill was offered by Cory Booker, D-N.J., whose home state hasn’t benefited from the current formula, and former Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel approved the measure, but it never went to the Senate floor.
Earmarks, COLA, debt limit
The last time Clyburn sat on the powerful committee was during President George W. Bush’s administration, meaning Clyburn was not on Appropriations during the decadelong earmark ban.
Clyburn called that ban and the similar prohibition on giving lawmakers an annual cost-of-living adjustment two of the worst mistakes Congress has made during his tenure. Lawmakers have not received a pay raise since 2009, with their salaries frozen at $174,000.
“We decided you had to be rich to be a member of Congress,” Clyburn said.
While earmarking has strong support in both parties in Congress, some members are worried that President Donald Trump could successfully encourage Republican leadership to kill the process.
Clyburn said the practice lets members of Congress rather than “faceless bureaucrats” make spending decisions in their communities.
“They’ve never been in the community, they don’t know a thing about it, they wouldn’t know how to get there with a compass,” he said. “And they’re going to tell me that I don’t know what’s best for my community, but I’m the one that is talking to these people every day.”
Another key Clyburn priority during Trump’s second term is to protect President Barack Obama’s health care law, which Republicans unsuccessfully attempted to repeal during Trump’s first term.
He also said he is planning on working with South Carolina’s Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, to advance more parochial priorities during the Trump administration.
One area on which Clyburn and Trump do see eye to eye: abolishing the debt limit, which is set to come up again this summer.
“I’m all for getting rid of that,” he said. “So I hope there is other common ground I can find with Donald Trump. We are certainly on the same wavelength with the debt limit.”
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