Tag Archive: Earmarks

There Is No Earmark Moratorium (Cont’d)

by Paul Blumenthal Mar 7, 2011 5:07 pm

As previously stated, there is no earmark moratorium. Politico reports on the joint work of Sen. Jim Inhofe, earmark fan,... View Article

Where is Obama on Bush’s Earmark Transparency Executive Order

by John Wonderlich Mar 7, 2011 9:47 am

Since the current leadership “ban” on earmarks went into effect at the beginning of this Congress, there has been an... View Article

There Is No Earmark Moratorium

by Paul Blumenthal Feb 14, 2011 3:10 pm

Eliza Newlin Carney has an interesting article in today’s National Journal about the fall of earmarks and how that will... View Article

Deterring Corruption by Improving Disclosure

by Lisa Rosenberg Jan 12, 2011 2:07 pm

Late last week, PMA lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti was sentenced to 27 months in prison and a $75,000 fine after pleading... View Article

Earmark transparency unwound the omnibus

by Paul Blumenthal Dec 17, 2010 11:45 am

Slate’s Dave Weigel has a really interesting take on why the omnibus spending bill just stalled in the Senate: The... View Article

Senate discloses earmarks…poorly

by Bill Allison

investigations

Dec 14, 2010 6:13 pm

Senate Appropriations chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, packed more than $130 million worth of defense earmarks into the $1.1. trillion Omnibus Act that the Senate released yesterday. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the committee's top Republican, larded the bill with more than $167 million defense earmarks. To find that out, one has to download the earmark table--in PDF--then convert the PDF to a tab delimited format, then plug them into a database (we've done so for Defense earmarks in a Socrata database below).

In January's State of the Union address, President Obama called for Congress to release ...

Leading by Example: Earmark Transparency

by Ellen Miller Dec 10, 2010 4:24 pm

Due to the failure of Congress to act on President Obama's State of the Union call for a central database of earmarks, a number of NGOs had to build one from the disjointed and disparate disclosures on congressional websites. The database of earmark requests for 2011 was diligently compiled by WashingtonWatch.com, Taxpayers for Common Sense (both Sunlight grantees) and Taxpayers Against Earmarks. They had to troll through more than 39,000 requests sprinkled across congressional websites and deal with horrible data quality issues. As Daniel Schuman expanded on earlier this year, it ain't easy tracking earmarks.

Loopholes already being sought for earmark ban

by Paul Blumenthal Dec 9, 2010 12:49 pm

Some House Republicans are already looking for a way around the ban on earmarks imposed on the next Congress. These members are rapidly trying to come up with a new definition for earmarks, or directed spending, to skirt the ban. Politico reports, "[S]ome Republicans are discussing exemptions to the earmark ban, allowing transportation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and water projects. While transportation earmarks are probably the most notorious — think “Bridge to Nowhere” — there is talk about tweaking the very definition of “earmark.”