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).

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?

The Sunlight Foundation has joined with Americans for Prosperity, OMB Watch and Taxpayers for Common Sense to ask you to ask your members of Congress to take the following pledge:

Earmark Transparency Pledge I, __________________________________ (Member of Congress) do hereby pledge in the spirit of transparency and reform that effective immediately I will voluntarily post on my official Congressional website a regularly updated list of every earmark and/or targeted tax benefit that I request.

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When the House Armed Services Committee disclosed earmarks in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, it left out 53 of them worth a total of $744 million, according to a new report from our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense:

When the House of Representatives passed new rules just a few days into the new Congress requiring lawmakers to disclose the earmarks they insert into bills, applause was tempered by Washington concern about whether or not lawmakers would actually do what they say.

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Rep. Darrell Issa, one of a handful (but a growing handful) of members who post lists of their earmark requests online has sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to fellow House members asking that they do the same (full text, plus a release, is here:

An effort is reportedly underway on the Appropriations Committee to hide Member “earmark” requests from public scrutiny. According to the Associated Press, “Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.” While the leadership of the Appropriations Committee forges a procedural shield to protect wasteful spending and thwart public scrutiny of projects, I urge you to counter this wrong-headed approach and join the handful of Members who have made a voluntary public disclosure on their websites of all FY 2008 project requests made to the Appropriations Committee.

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