A coalition of lobbyists and good government advocates today released 5 principles for reforming how Congress grants earmark requests. The principles call upon Congress to:

1. Impose a limit on earmarks directed to campaign contributors
2. ban congressional staff from participating in fundraising
3. Build an earmarks database (structured along the lines of the database called for in the Earmark Transparency Act)
4. Require GAO to conduct random earmark audits
5. Require Members of Congress to certify that earmark recipients are qualified to handle earmarks

The coalition is composed of Melanie Sloan from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Rich Gold of Holland and Knight, Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste, Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, Craig Holman of Public Citizen, and former Representatives James Walsh.

The Sunlight Foundation has long called for improving transparency in the earmark process. As my colleague Lisa Rosenberg wrote after a Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing on the Earmark Transparency Act, “a single database of earmark requests is an idea whose time has come.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted out S. 3335, the Earmark Transparency Act today, but not without objections. The bill would create a single searchable, sortable database of earmark requests, providing one-stop shopping for valuable, detailed information about congressional earmarks.

An effort to move the bill forward last month was delayed when Sen. Levin raised concerns about the cost and technical feasibility of the bill. We understand the need for caution before mandating the Secretary of the Senate and Clerk of the House undertake a new responsibility, but the smart folks over in Sunlight Labs, who create these kinds of databases for a living, assure me that most of the Senators’ concerns can be addressed.

At today’s markup, Senator Levin suggested that it would be difficult to sort data by the various data elements required by the Earmark Transparency Act. Projects we’ve worked on, such as Subsidyscope and Elena’s Inbox, belie any claim that such a requirement is too technologically cumbersome for the Secretary of the Senate and Clerk of the House. Technological “hurdles” should not be used as an excuse to water down the bill. We would be disappointed if, as has been suggested, the earmark database were limited to the five data-points listed in Senate Rule XLIV. There is a great deal more information about earmarks that should be made publicly available and easily accessible.

On the other hand, Senator Levin raised some points that deserve a second look. He is concerned that the bill does not adequately protect proprietary information and that it requires information—such as cost estimates and percentage of federal funds used for a project—that Members simply don’t have access to at the time they make an earmark request.

These seem like issues that could and should be easily remedied—and we would urge all parties resolve them before this bill comes to the floor of the Senate. Time is running out this Congress, and unfortunately, the Earmark Transparency Act probably won’t get a week of floor time to hammer out differences through debate and amendments. (Of course, after negotiation, we would want to see the revised bill online for 72 hours prior to floor consideration.)

A single database of earmark requests is an idea whose time has come. The technology is there and the public deserves to know the who, what, when, where, why and how much behind the earmark requests that are being made by their elected officials. We urge the leaders on this issue to continue working to resolve their differences so that a strong earmark database bill can be voted on this Congress.

Update 2:30 pm by John Wonderlich --

Here's the text of the letter we sent Monday to the same effect, explaining details on the technical feasibility of the bill:

7/26/2010 The Honorable Senator Carl Levin 269 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510 cc: Dr. Tom Coburn Dear Senator Levin: The Sunlight Foundation is advocating for passage of S. 3335, the Earmark Transparency Act. By centralizing all earmark requests in a single database, the bill vastly improves the way in which information about earmarks is disclosed. We understand that you strongly support the goal of making earmark information more transparent and accessible to the public, but are concerned about the feasibility of this particular bill. The Sunlight Foundation has a great deal of expertise creating databases that enable the public to sort and search diffuse and complicated government data. We hope to address many of your concerns based on our experience. We understand that you are concerned that it may not be technically feasible to satisfythe bill’s requirement to create a website that allows the public to search and aggregateearmarks by any of more than twenty data-points listed in the legislation, especially data-points that include lengthy and non-standardized information such as justification for the project and supplemental documents. In fact, it is possible to aggregate calculations by values derived from fields that include attachments or lengthy text descriptions by sorting by phrases contained in those fields. For example, a query for all the earmarks with the phrase "ethanol", binned by congressman, is certainly achievable. There are several free and open source search engines for a variety of programming languages that support this kind of free text search and aggregation. Our Subsidyscope and Elena’s Inbox projects required searches to be performed on non-standard text fields in a manner similar to what would be required by the Earmark Transparency Act. For those projects, we had a choice of versatile, free software options to perform the advanced query, filter and aggregation operations we required. The software we chose used a standards-based web interface that allowed it to communicate with any programming language. The Earmark Transparency Act calls for the website to be put in place within six months of enactment, and we understand you are concerned that may not be sufficient time for the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate to create the website and the earmark database. Based on our own experience, we believe the six-month time frame should be adequate. At Sunlight, we built a searchable database of subsidy related transactions from the data that drives USASpending.gov in less than two months.The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate may have somewhat less staff availability and expertise than Sunlight, so a slight cushion in terms of timing may bereasonable. Nevertheless, it is important that public availability of this crucial database not be unnecessarily delayed. Finally, you have raised questions about the cost to create this website. Sunlight believes the costs would be relatively small, encompassing the costs staff needed to develop the database and relatively inexpensive web hosting costs. We would strongly encourage dedicated funding to ensure this project has the resources to be successfully launched and maintained. In addition to addressing some of the concerns you have raised, we would be remiss if we did not take this opportunity to recommend that a unique identifier for Members of Congress be added to the required data elements in the bill. Bioguide ID is an identifier Congress assigns to each Member and has become the de facto identifier for congressional datasets including OpenSecrets, govtrack and our own Congress API. Including bioguide ID would allow for very easy cross-referencing with other data about Congress, furthering the bill’s goals. The Earmark Transparency Act is important legislation that would create a powerful new resource for American citizens. We hope we have addressed some of your concerns and would be happy to answer any follow up questions you have. Sincerely, Ellen S. Miller

I'm pretty excited to be joining the team here at Sunlight. I'm the new Lead Organizer for the Public Equals Online campaign, which means that most of the time when you're hearing from me, I'll be asking you for something: ideas, feedback, calls to Congress. I'm lucky to be jumping into a community of people that's already passionate and knowledgeable about transparency and open government; now we just have to channel that passion toward a campaign in order to make actual legislative change. Sunlight launched the Public Equals Online campaign in March, and now it's time to really get moving.

A question posed on our Citizens for Open Government list today made us pause, though, to reassess where we are before we move on to the next step. We're going back to basics. To start, we're taking a look at our goals, and being clear about what it will take to achieve them. Our end goal is an open and transparent government. As our pledge states:

We believe a transparent government is one more deserving of our trust, and is one that allows us the ability to fully participate, collaborate, and hold government accountable as our Founders intended.

Four pieces of recently introduced legislation, the Public Online Information Act, the Transparency in Government Act, the DISCLOSE Act (related to campaign expenditures), and the Earmark Transparency Act would allow us to get further than ever to our goal. On a national level, we'll be focusing on these, and building a powerful voting bloc that will put pressure on Congress to fight for an open and transparent government. These pieces of legislation would not only better our day to day government workings, but have a decisive impact on some of the most important events of our time. They could help us prevent another coal mine disaster in West Virginia, or help us determine the extent of, and thus recover from, the damage from the BP oil spill.

Government isn't just federal, however, and so we'll also work to support and celebrate the local victories that make everything from municipal to state governments more open and transparent, and use these to grow the national movement for transparency.

Over the next few days, we'll be assessing the resources we've got and planning out the summer and fall. That's where you come in. This list is by no means comprehensive, and we want your ideas, critiques, and overall feedback.

What we've got so far:

• Citizens for Open Government - an incredible resource of people that are passionate about open government to share ideas and communication about the campaign

  

• 6,562 people that have signed the Public Equals Online pledge (if you haven't signed yet, you can at http://PublicEqualsOnline.com. Once you've signed, share the pledge with your friends)
• PublicEqualsOnline.com -- with recently launched collaborative new tools for events and project building
• A full time staff member devoted to supporting the work you're doing (that's me)

We're lucky to have the support of several other groups and are looking forward to reaching out to even more, and in the next few weeks we'll be working on the best way to structure those partnerships and make sure there's space for both individual and institutional involvement. If you've been involved with another organization that's doing work with open government or transparency or have ideas for how to partner with an organization like that, that's great! Please let me know about it - who they are, what they're doing, how we can work together.

One thing that will not change: the need for your involvement and feedback every step of the way. We cannot win without the dedicated involvement of people all over the country.

You can start helping the campaign right now: go to http://PublicEqualsOnline.com/leaders/survey and let us know your thoughts.

The recent policies imposed by the House Appropriations Committee and the House Republican Caucus to ban for-profit earmarks and all earmarks respectively will reduce the ability of the public to track directed spending and do little to stem this type of spending. Perhaps this is counter-intuitive to some people, but, as the late, great Bill Hicks would say, "I know this is not a very popular idea. You don't hear it too often any more … but it's the truth."

First of all, the obvious, the for-profit earmark ban and the House Republican earmark ban both only apply to the House of Representatives. The Senate refuses to follow suit. With the Senate earmarking precious appropriations dollars, House members will take to lobbying their state's senators for earmarks in their respective districts. The money isn't drying up, so why not try to get some.

Second, tons of not-for-profit earmarks go to colleges, universities, non-profits and state and local governments that then contract out to for-profit firms. Here are some examples:

Twice in recent years, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) helped obtain earmarks totaling $3.2 million for a home-state university to study how to make military jet fuel from plants. Standing behind that nonprofit work, however, is a for-profit Chicago firm that often partners with universities to reap part of their earmark benefits. (Washington Post)

Another example of controversial earmarks the new reform would not touch is a nonprofit defense research center at Pennsylvania State University that collected nearly $250 million in earmarks through Murtha, then channeled a significant portion of the funds to companies that were among Murtha’s campaign supporters.

According to a report in the Washington Post, officials at the center regularly consulted with two “handlers” close to Murtha, one of whom was a lobbyist for the PMA Group, a firm that recently disbanded in the wake of an FBI raid on its offices. (The Hill)

The above-linked Washington Post article rightly notes that, "[the] new rule was widely touted as a crackdown, but in reality it could leave untouched almost 90 percent of typical earmarks."

Third, there are a variety of other ways for lawmakers to secure earmarked funds outside of the appropriations committee. One such example are the earmarks included in the transportation reauthorization bill. Unlike the Appropriations Committee, the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee does not post online the requests they receive from members nor does it require members to post their transportation earmarks to their official web sites. Transportation earmarks only come up every four years. If a ban remains in effect, lawmakers will certainly look for other ways to direct spending to their district. By going through Transportation Committee they would be circumventing transparency rules set up by the Appropriations Committee.

Even more troubling could be the increase in "phone-marks" in place of earmarks. "Phone-marks" are the practice of lawmakers lobbying executive agencies to give money to particular organizations. Lawmaker lobbying could easily be instigated by an outside lobbyist or campaign contributor seeking funding for a project. And, of course, there is no transparency in this process.

What Congress really needs to do is pass real earmark reform. Earmark reform that makes the process totally transparent and encoded in rules or laws. Committee imposed rules or bans can easily be changed or circumvented -- this includes the committee's imposed rules on earmark transparency. Passing a resolution like the Cassidy-Speier earmark reform bill would allow people to actually see the earmarking process before their eyes, instead of head-faking with a ban and then taking the process underground.

Yesterday, the House and Senate announced new earmark rules, which Sunlight's Bill Allison addressed here on the Sunlight blog and at Real Time Investigations. (John Wonderlich also looked at the proposal here.) Taxpayers for Common Sense has a similar take as Allison and listed changes that would make these reforms far more effective.

Perhaps the most crucial problem in the new rules is that they do not require a single point of disclosure, instead mandating each individual lawmaker disclose earmark requests on their official web site. In a response to a comment suggesting that Sunlight (or some other group) could create a unified, searchable earmark request database out of the soon to be newly disclosed information, Bill Allison explained how the dispersion of earmark disclosure can be such a huge problem:

We’d love to do all of that, of course, but how Congress publishes the data has a direct bearing on how feasible that is.

Let’s say that members have to disclose the following for every earmark: Project Name, Location, Recipient, Amount Requested, Dept. or Agency that would oversee earmark and Justification. So Sen. Smedley Smith does it like this:

Sen. Smedley Smith secured from the Defense budget $18 million to purchase state-of-the-art $600 hammers from Springfield-based Boondoggle Inc. as part of the Army’s Operational Management account.

Not exactly easy to turn into data. Rep. Rube Ryan does it like this:

$1 million: To the University of Shelbyville Systems Material Management Institute in Shelbyville, to develop crunchless potato chips for MREs, from the Army RDTE budget.

While you probably wouldn’t end up with 535 different formats, it’s unlikely that you’d end up with earmarks disclosed in a uniform format that could be easily scraped from member Web sites and loaded into a database.

Add to this the likelihood that these disclosures would be disclosed in different places by different members — Sen. Porkbragger puts them on his home page, Rep. Limelighter posts each disclosure as a separate press release while Rep. Fillibluster likes to hide the link in his 72 screen long list of legislative accomplishments (helpfully labeled, “other actions”), and you begin to see what you’re up against.

Let’s first make sure that Congress gets the basic disclosure done properly, and then we–along with other groups and individuals–would be happy to find ways to add value to it, allowing for citizen input, cross-referencing with other data, and all kinds of other tools.