At long last, the U.S. Senate has begun online publication of how it spends money on itself --  barely meeting the statutory deadline. The House of Representatives began publishing its statement of disbursements online in November 2009 per then-Speaker Pelosi's directive; the Senate belatedly followed suit after Senator Tom Coburn's amendment to the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act in July 2009 finally kicked in, two years later.

While these disbursement statements have been published by the House and Senate for nearly 200 years, online publication only came about through a combination of the Sunlight Foundation's request and a huge scandal in the UK over members of parliament spending taxpayer money on building moats, fixing up their homes, and other illegal purposes. The reports allow reporters, watchdogs, and the general public to see how money is spent on everything from trips to staff salaries to office equipment to perks. How did the Senate do in reporting this information?

The Senate has inaccurately labeled its link to the report as for "October 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011," but rest assured, if you click the link, the linked report covers April 1, 2011 to September 30, 2011. The report itself is unfinished, omitting some Senate employees, a failing the report acknowledges. These omissions make a full evaluation difficult at this time. (There's no indication of how long we'll have to wait, either.)  In addition, the House published a detailed online guide http://disbursements.house.gov/ to its expenditure report; the Senate has not.

In short, the online version of the Senate's expenditure report looks (at first glance) very much like the print version. While deeper digging is required, as far as we can tell, the Senate has not redacted or condensed any data beyond what they already do in the print publication; the House ran into trouble when its online version resulted in a loss of data. Not making things worse, however, doesn't mean that the effort is a full success.

We had expected that the very lengthy wait would have meant that the Senate would have released the information in a database, and not only in a huge (12 MB) searchable PDF. For the public -- or members of the Senate -- to be able to evaluate the contents of the report, they're going to have to scrape all of the data from the PDF and put it into a database. It took considerable effort and expense for Sunlight to scrape the House expenditure reports. A preliminary technology assessment by one of my colleagues indicates that it's going to as hard, if not harder, to do the same for the Senate's report.

There's also been a failure to think about how online publication is different from print. There aren't the same kind of space limitations online that exist otherwise. To the extent the Senate tracks how it spends money, it could make all (or nearly all) of that information available online -- not just the condensed versions it already publishes. While phrases in the document like "certified purchased equipment" and "fees and other charges" give some hint about what they refer to, we can really do much better than this. There are also a number of minor errors -- from misspelling Mitch McConnell's last name on page C-1 to using periods instead of commas to separate first and last names.

In this era of tight budgets, Senators should demand that the Senate's statement of disbursements be complete, accurate, timely, and in an easy-to-use online database. We'll keep digging into this.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, after stating his support for earmarks, has come out to back a moratorium on earmarks among the Senate Republican caucus.

“Today, I am announcing that I will join the Republican leadership in the House in support of a moratorium on earmarks in the 112th Congress,” he said.

Mr. McConnell said he still had doubts about any step that might increase the authority of the executive branch over federal spending. The Constitution, of course, bestows the power of the purse upon Congress.

“I’m not wild about turning over more spending authority to the executive branch,” Mr. McConnell said. “But I have come to share the view of most Americans that our nation is at a crossroads; that we will not be able to secure the kind of future we want for our children and grandchildren unless we act, and act quickly.”

McConnell is joining the House Republicans who have an earmark moratorium in place for their caucus already and intend on extending it to the full House when they ascend to the majority in January, 2011.

There are some in McConnell's caucus who have strongly backed earmarks and he may face some division when he brings the moratorium to a vote in his caucus. Sen. Jim Inhofe has publicly backed earmarks and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who looks set to win her write-in bid in Alaska, has made a living off of them. Appropriations Ranking Member Thad Cochran is also a die-hard earmarker.

The next question is what the Senate Democrats do next. With no earmarks coming out of the House, the Senate Democratic caucus will be the only group originating earmarks. Does President Obama, who recently reiterated his criticism of earmarks, side with the Republicans and support a moratorium? There isn't much of an anti-earmark sentiment within the Democratic base, unlike on the Republican side, to push the lawmakers who love earmarks to act.

The Sunlight Foundation has always supported more transparency in earmarking and we continue to worry that a moratorium could push the practice of congressionally directed spending into less transparent venues.

The Lexington Herald Ledger nails Sen. Mitch McConnell down on his hypocrisy in regards to transparency for organizations trying to influence the political process:

Mitch McConnell believed in public disclosure related to campaign contributions in 1987. In a commentary published in the Herald-Leader, he lauded "post-Watergate disclosure laws" that help "flush out" politicians who "sacrifice duties or principles to get more money."

Kentucky's senior U.S. senator believed in disclosure in 1989 when he joined a Democratic colleague in introducing legislation that, among other things, would have required disclosure of independent groups or individuals who intended to spend more than $25,000 promoting or attacking a candidate. ... McConnell remained a true believer in disclosure as a candidate for re-election in 1990, when he pledged to introduce a bill that would require full disclosure of donors to multi-candidate political-action committees.

Running for re-election again in 1996, McConnell supported public disclosure of all election-related spending, including spending by independent groups and contributions to political parties.

In a commentary published by the Herald-Leader the following year, McConnell wrote, "Public disclosure of campaign contributions and spending should be expedited so voters can judge for themselves what is appropriate." ... Given McConnell's 20-year devotion to the Holy Grail of disclosure, it may seem puzzling to hear him speak of it now as if it were the handiwork of Lucifer himself. But there's no puzzle to it. McConnell's apostasy on this issue is born of a Supreme Court decision that took his "money as free speech" argument to its ridiculous extreme.

Now that corporations are people, too, in the eyes of the court and free to spend at will on political causes, McConnell doesn't want his buddies in the nation's boardrooms pestered by any disclosure rules.

Sunlight's Bill Allison was on Brian Lehrer Live discussing efforts to put the proposed stimulus bill online and in a searchable format. Watch the video: Republicans Favoring Increased Transparency for Obama Spending Bill from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.