Earmarks are a loop

If the senators understood minimization of transactions, they would immediately get the earmark problem, it s an expensive extra step in legislation.

The senators, like any good CEO, would opt for the budgetary cash exchange, estimate the cost, do the deal beforehand. Then the loop is gone.

This is almost provable, one could take a large sample of bills and trace their path as in a spanning tree.   Statistiacally, these are all complete sequences. Find their encoding to the probably error limit. You will see large skew in your encoding graph. Those are the spectral moments when each of these things runs the loop from House to Senate to House.

Good CEOs do this naturally, they watch for the minimizing patterns, and expose the loops. Forensic accounting, once again. That was Matt Damon's point in Good Will Hunting get the problem mapped to a graph without loops, then graph manipulations theories get you most of what you need.  The scene where Matt and the mit prof were at the chalk board. Matt bounced a loop through a graph, becoming a factor in the eqution, the MIT prof getting to cancel out the denomitors to Matt's numerators.

It works Because Russel Crow found stability of graph conditions in A Beautiful Mind. He was watching pidgeons on the campus bench, wondering how they could collectively maintain the separation patterns. When the patterns are stable, then we can do graph proofs within a bounded error.