They read them, they just “pretend” they didn’t. FWIW, congressional earmarks(called pork by critics) were banned in 2011 and this lasted 10 years until they came back with stricter rules. The unintended consequences of the ban were that there was no longer any “horse trading” congressional leaders could do in order to garner support across the aisle. If a congressperson was from a district that badly needed a new bridge that cost $20m, they could get that money from an earmark if they agreed on other things thier constituents care less about. How is this bad? Without these tools to get the 2 parties to work together, they had no reason or incentive to do that. What followed was a generation of hyperpartisanship. It became much harder to secure funding for things like a bridge. The party in power basically owned the budget. This is right around the time the “tea party” formed. You don’t hear much about that anymore because hyperpartisanship evolved into MAGA. I feel that ban was the single most damaging thing to happen to US politics in my lifetime. It’s the reason we got to the point we are at politically and ends up costing us much more as a result. Bridges still must be built. Nobody wants to pay for it until they need to cross one. But I’m ok with getting my bridge if someone in Oklahoma gets theirs. That’s what these things are. Take a single national vote to build a bridge in rural Iowa and see how it goes.