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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

They’ve got a release on it here. I can’t tell for sure from the memo, but it looks like Office of Management and Budget intends to track them in both House and Senate bills as they’re reported out of committee, as they’re voted on, and in conference reports as soon as they come out:
Agencies should [...]

[Read more →]

Three paragraphs jumped out at me from the final chapter of Robert G. Kaiser’s excellent Washington Post series, Citizen K Street:
Cassidy helped change Washington by shaping the culture of congressional earmarks that became so important in the last dozen years. Earmarks directly transfer the government’s money to particular institutions and interests. He and his original [...]

[Read more →]

CONTINUING WITH SOME OTHER EARMARKS in the OMB database, the Department of Justice gave $740,000 to Mistral Security Inc, for continuing a drug identification program. This grant was to expand an aerosol drug detection technology that is already being tested in schools as a pilot run. The aerosol sprays can be used to detect the [...]

[Read more →]

After fooling around with it for the last half-day or so, I feel confident I can pronounce the new OMB earmark database a great tool and a success for OMB, and I can’t wait for the updates going forward.
One thing I wanted to try was to see if one can match companies that get earmarks [...]

[Read more →]

I’M TOO EASILY DISTRACTED by eamarks. Since the Office of Management and Budget posted its earmark database, I’ve found it hard to concentrate on the 1990 portion of the SF-LLL timeline (which is mostly written but still needs a lot of links). Instead, I keep looking up things like this:
Virginia Equine Center Foundation / Virginia [...]

[Read more →]