In The Examiner Rep. John Boehner, the Republican House leader, declares victory in the effort to have earmarks disclosed earlier in the process.
As part of the deal completed after extensive negotiations that ended late today, Republicans agreed to allow two appropriations bills (Homeland Security and Military Quality of Life) – bills that include few or no earmarks – to move forward immediately. All 10 remaining appropriations bills will come to the floor later with their earmarks fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any lawmaker...Continue reading
Congressional financial disclosure forms now online
Today is the day that members of Congress must make their personal financial disclosure forms public. The Center for Responsive Politics has them up here. PoliticalMoneyLine, a division of Congressional Quarterly, has them online, in big, state-by-state PDFs. The House is here, the Senate here.
Continue readingMembers Take Responsibility for Public Disclosure of Documents
Do two representatives make a trend? Today, Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) posted her personal financial disclosure form on her member Web site. (See it here.) This makes her the second known member of Congress to post their financial disclosure form to their Web site. Last month, Bill blogged about Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) being the first known member to post these documents to their site. As I've explained before, citizens can only get personal financial disclosure forms, the documents that tell you how much your congressman is worth and what assets they own, directly from Congress by travelling to Washington, DC and picking up the hard copies from the Legislative Resource Center (located in the basement of Cannon Office Building). Gillibrand and Issa are doing a much needed service by being personally responsible for the public disclosure of these vital documents.
Continue readingEarmark Deal?
The Washington Post's Elizabeth Williamson writes that a deal to release the full list of earmarks sooner rather than later is, maybe, imminent, pending, likely or unlikely (I'm paraphrasing) depending on which House member or staffer you ask; InstaPundit quotes Jeff Flake's press release saying that "the House Appropriations Committee will attach earmarks to the remaining appropriations bills before consideration on the House floor, which will allow Members to attempt to strike out individual earmarks," but later, InstaPundit adds that there may be backsliding; meanwhile Porkbusters seems to be down, at least when I try to get to it, but I understand from email it's flashing a victory sign...
Continue readingDefense Contractors Reap Windfall in 2005 Earmarks
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 recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors.
The analysis was based on the database of earmarks from 2005 produced, and posted online, by the federal government's Office of Management and Budget. OMB collected the data from the agencies responsible for ...
Continue readingWhat Earmark Winners Tell us about Congress
A smart observation in an email puts the analysis that my colleagues Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy did on earmarks into sharper relief. They found that the top 20 corporate recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors, to which my correspondent responds:
The principal political science "justifications" for earmarking is that it enables elected representatives -- rather than unelected bureaucrats -- to allocate a small amount of scarce resources to small, useful, local projects that might get overlooked by the bureaucracy and about which the elected folks have superior, maybe exclusive knowledge and perception. How far away from that can you get when (1) the decisions are at the core of the national issue of "national" defense and the projects are part of a comprehensive, increasingly technologically driven interrelated military planning process, and (2) these get earmarked because tens if not hundreds of millions are spent obtaining these earmarks through highly paid lobbyists and related political contributions by the billion dollar beneficiaries of these earmarks.Continue reading
New Tools for Tracking Earmarks Show Dominance of Defense, Alaska and the University of Hawaii
The top 20 corporate recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors. The state of Alaska, per capita, had more earmarked funds lavished on it than any other. Almost half of all earmarks were defense-related. The seven companies that landed more then $100 million in earmarks are some of the biggest players in Washington--the sort of firms that spend millions each year lobbying on everything from taxes and trade policy to health care to appropriations issues. The top recipient among universities was in Hawaii. We've taken the latest version of the Office of Management and Budget's 2005 earmark data, cleaned it up, standardized names and linked subsidiaries with parents. Then we analyzed the data, identifying the top earmark recipients. We visualized it in new and innovative ways (Alaska appears in OMB's database 235 times, while the much more populous state of Ohio is mentioned only 145 times; click here to see the graphic representation of this and much more). We're offering our cleaned data for download (here and here), and we're even providing an analysis of the current state of earmark reform (which hasn't exactly been working in practice).
Continue readingSign Up to Help the House Evaluate Earmarks
Our friend N.Z. Bear has a new sign up page on the Porkbusters site that allows citizens to volunteer to evaluate some of the 36,000 some earmarks flooding the House--so many that Rep. David Obey, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, announced a while back that they couldn't possibly publish them all until the absolute end of the process--when it would have been too late to do anything about them--because of the time needed to vet them. It appears Obey is now saying that lists of earmarks will be published "in The Congressional Record a month before they come up for final approval." Of course, there's no reason to wait that long -- lists of earmarks and earmark requests are sitting around the committee offices for months now; why not make the whole process transparent by making the requests publicly available the moment they're sent to the committee?
Continue readingUpdate on Office of Technology Assessment
Last week, I wrote that the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee had restored the funding for the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan technology research agency that was defunded in 1995. Initially we were told that the subcommittee reestablished the OTA with $2.5 million in funding but as more information has come out I have to change what was reported last week. According to Technology Daily's Aliya Sternstein, the $2.5 million appropriated by the subcommittee was directed to the General Accounting Office to do technology studies. This is still a great step forward as the GAO is respected for its research and, unlike CRS, posts all of its research online for the general public. This is a great victory for anyone wants members of Congress to have access to the best technology research available. The Sunlight Foundation is especially excited about future reports on how Internt techonology can improve the way Congress relates to the public. If you want to look at what these reports might look like check out this OTA report from 1988 titled, "Informing the Nation: Federal Information Dissemination in an Electronic Age."
Continue readingTracking another mystery PAC
I kind of like digging into these -- some people do crossword puzzles, I like figuring out which member goes with which leadership PAC. BillPAC, on page three of its March 13, 2006 amended Statement of Organization, provides the following address for its treasurer, Jeff Reeder: 10970 McFarland Rd., Mercersburg, PA 17236. I ran the address through the U.S. Postal Service's 9-digit zip generator -- 17236-9642 -- and plugged that into Project Vote Smart's 9 digit zip search. The address is in Rep. Bill Shuster's district.
Again, none of this constitutes definitive proof -- but when I call Mr. Reeder ...
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