President Donald Trump punctuated a contentious White House meeting with congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle on Tuesday with an aside that almost instantly caused an uproar among some of his most devoted conservative allies.

“You know our system lends itself to not getting things done. I hear so much about earmarks and how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks,” Trump remarked during the meeting, which was called to talk about heading off a government shutdown on January 19.

“Of course they had other problems, but maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks,” he said. Earmarks were abolished in Congress in 2010 after years of negative media coverage of waste, fraud and abuse — which had been made possible by the ability of anonymous members of Congress to insert spending provisions that often benefited family members, campaign contributors, and other special interests.

There were more than 110,000 earmarks approved by Congress between 1991 and 2010, worth nearly $300 billion, according to Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a conservative nonprofit that was among the leading voices in the long campaign to abolish those provisions.

Shortly after initial reports of Trump’s remarks, Tom Schatz, CAGW’s president, pounced on the idea that restoring earmarks would lead the way to renewed bipartisanship on Capitol Hill.

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“The claim that earmarks are necessary to help pass bills has been debunked by the passage in the House of all 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2018,” he said in a statement. “It was not necessary to resort to the prior practice of ‘legalized bribery’ under which a few million dollars in earmarks were traded for votes in favor of hundreds of billions of dollars in spending bills.”

“Earmarks are a lazy, unfair and corrupt way to circumvent the authorization and appropriations process. They have been roundly excoriated by the conservative movement upon which Republicans depend for their political lives,” he said.

Similarly, Steve Ellis, another veteran of the earmark wars during the first decade of the 21st century, expressed dismay at Trump’s comments, saying “earmarks are an integral part of the political swamp ecosystem. Bringing them back will relaunch a pay-to-play system that leads to more wasteful spending. Earmarks may sound like a quick fix, but in reality it’s about writing better bills and doing hard work.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders later in the day tried to put a damper on the conservative outrage, emphasizing during the Tuesday press briefing that “the president said you have to be careful with that, and you have to have controls on earmarks.”

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White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders later in the day tried to put a damper on the conservative outrage, emphasizing during the Tuesday press briefing that “the president said you have to be careful with that, and you have to have controls on earmarks.”

The comments about earmarks, according to Sanders, were linked to “the broader point the president was making … that partisan politics have become a big problem in Washington. We’ve gotten to a place where Democrats and Republicans are fighting more than they’re fixing. And he threw that out as one suggestion on how we might be able to do that.”

Former Rep. David McIntosh of Indiana was in Congress during the earmark debates. Now president of the Club for Growth, he also had nothing good to say about the possibility of reviving earmarks.

“If Republicans bring back earmarks, then it virtually guarantees that they will lose the House,” McIntosh said. “Bringing back earmarks is the antithesis of draining the swamp. Earmarks will only benefit the special interests that grow government at the expense of working men and women.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst contributed reporting to this piece. 

Senior editor Mark Tapscott can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.