Transportation’s Inspector General has launched an investigation of the Transportation Technology Innovation and Demonstration program–at the request of a pair of members of Congress, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.–to determine whether the program, as administered by the Federal Highway Administration, fulfilled the goals set for it by Congress and whether FHWA [...]

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After it hired a lobbyist and its employees’ contributed to the leadership political action committee of a member of Congress, a Kentucky company saw its defense business quadruple thanks to earmarks.
Over the last three years, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., says he has earmarked at least $10.4 million in defense funds for Phoenix Products, Inc., [...]

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Three members of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee have received an average of $102,600 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of the companies they’ve favored with earmarks in the first six months of 2007. The rest of the members of the subcommittee have netted collectively $180,000—an average of about $12,800 per member—from [...]

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Via the invaluable blog devoted to developments in federal government ethics, the IEC Journal, I came across this Web course for federal workers on the issues raised by working with government contractors:
Increasingly, private sector contractor employees are being used to accomplish the business of Government. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. These contractor [...]

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This article in the Washington Post yesterday on the earmarking process cites letters sent to the Department of Energy written by members of Congress including Rep. Rahm Emanuel in support of projects at the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago and the Illinois Institute of technology.
We recently received the correspondence logs from [...]

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I’m going through the version of the bill N.Z. posted, and came across this language on page 68:
(2) that the information in clause (1) has been available on a publicly accessible congressional website in a searchable format at least 48 hours before such vote.
Clause 1 requires all congressionally directed spending in bills — earmarks, tax [...]

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Browsing through the 2008 Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill on the Taxpayers for Common Sense site, I noticed that one of the largest amounts ($11 million) was earmarked to the National Rural Water Association – a non-profit organization that provides training and technical assistance and gives out sub-grants to water providers in rural areas. [...]

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Here’s a little information on something we started

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By Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy
The nation’s top defense contractors were also the biggest beneficiaries of congressional earmarks in 2005, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation has found. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics led the pack. Those four corporations collected a combined $1.09 billion in earmark awards. Overall, the top 20 corporate [...]

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Christin T. Baker, the associate director for communications in the Office of Management and Budget, voicemails and emails that OMB already tracks “nontraditional sorts of ways of getting projects funded” in its database, something they’ll continue to do in 2008. Here’s one example from 2005, gotten by downloading the CSV data from the site into [...]

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