• Waiting for fine print on earmark requests…

    By Bill Allison on 01/06/09 @ 7:56 pm | 0 Comments

    Over on Sunlight’s grown up blog, I noted this Roll Call story on new earmark disclosures that the chairs of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees agreed to. Looking at the Gavel Blog of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it appears that the disclosures may be less than meets the eye. Taking the new rules in order…

    Posting Requests Online: To offer more opportunity for public scrutiny of member requests, members will be required to post information on their earmark requests on their websites at the time the request is made explaining the purpose of the earmark and why it is a valuable use of taxpayer funds.

    Note that there’s no mention of disclosing the recipient of the earmark. Congressman X can say he’s requesting an earmark to buy $600 hammers for the Pentagon because they’re critical for meeting the needs of the modern soldier without ever mentioning that Boondoggle Inc., his biggest contributor, is their manufacturer.

    Early Public Disclosure: To increase public scrutiny of committee decisions, earmark disclosure tables will be made publically [sic] available the same day as the House or Senate Subcommittee rather than Full Committee reports their bill or 24 hours before Full Committee consideration of appropriations legislation that has not been marked up by a Senate Subcommittee.

    Here’s what an earmark table looks like — this is from the 2008 Defense Appropriations Conference Report, and it’s hard to navigate, but note here too that there are no recipients listed.

    ← NY Times: Clinton Foundation Donor got help from Hillary  Presidential Library Reform bill… → 
    • 0 Comments on Waiting for fine print on earmark requests…
    Leave a Comment

(also available as a full page with descriptions)

The Site may contain links to Internet sites that are not operated by Sunlight Foundation. These links are provided as a service and do not imply any endorsement of the activities or content of these sites, nor any association with their operators. Sunlight Foundation does not control these Internet sites and is not responsible for their content, security, or privacy practices. We urge you to review the privacy policy posted on web sites you visit before using the site or providing personal information.


This work by Sunlight Foundation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.