“No matter what they tell you, there is just no way they can police all that,” Mr. Flake said. “They just don’t have the time or resources.”

Creative Approaches

Companies have shown remarkable ingenuity in skirting the rule or veiling their requests through nonprofit organizations, the Times review found. Among the examples:

¶The Virtual Reality Medical Center, a California-based company that sells visual simulation headgear as an experimental form of medical therapy, had sought nearly $6 million in earmarks before the ban. Soon after, company officials instead proposed that the money go to the Interactive Media Institute, a nonprofit group controlled by the center’s top executives, which had been set up to sponsor educational conferences.

An aide to Representative Corrine Brown, the Florida Democrat who submitted the request, acknowledged consulting with Virtual Reality executives and then jointly deciding to redirect the earmark. “The rules were that nonprofits can apply, so a nonprofit did,” said Lee Footer, a senior legislative assistant.

¶In Pennsylvania, General Electric is likely to get as much as 80 percent of a $2 million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning GE locomotives. At the suggestion of the company and the university’s lobbyist, according to a Penn State professor, the university is listed as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, as was done previously. GE executives made a series of political contributions to Representative Kathy Dahlkemper, Democrat of Pennsylvania, days after she submitted the earmark request.

¶In New York, the Copper Development Association, a nonprofit group controlled by copper manufacturers, is pursuing a $4.1 million earmark to hire suppliers to install its members’ copper products in New York City subway cars, asserting that the metal has qualities that inhibit the spread of infectious diseases.

¶And a group called the Solar Energy Consortium in Kingston, N.Y., is pursuing nearly $30 million in earmarks, with the help of Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York. The group, working out of a tiny office above a machine shop, does not perform its own research. Instead, it plans to pass on most of the earmark money to local businesses, some of which directly collected federal earmarks for solar projects this year but would no longer qualify.

Profit-making companies were singled out for the earmark ban because their requests, routinely submerged in giant budget bills by their allies in Congress, tended to be more questionable than those sought by nonprofit groups, which include charities, local governments and educational institutions.