Academic earmarks identified by the U.S. Congress through attachments to funding bills have represented a sizeable and growing revenue stream to institutions of higher education, yet little has been determined about the impacts this funding has on these institutions or the products of these institutions. A study was defined to test the argument that academic earmarks provided support for institutions to build research and development (R&D) infrastructure necessary for competition with peers. The population of interest was all U.S. public research institutions, and the principal research question was whether academic earmarks provided these institutions with increased academic R&D infrastructure as indicated by changes in R&D expenditures between 1993 and 2002. Structural equation path analysis was used to test the relationships among institutional control variables, total academic earmarks received, change in R&D expenditures, and institutional peer rankings over ten years.;The study demonstrated evidence that the practice of congressional academic earmarking at public research institutions did not have an effect on change in R&D expenditures or an effect on peer rankings. Three institutional control variables (EPSCoR affiliation, institutional ranking, and presence of an accredited engineering program) were found to be significant predictors of academic earmarks, accounting for 39% of the variable's variance.