In yesterday’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs meeting, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that portions of the bill were far too complex and were not able to be aggregated.
Not so, said Sunlight Foundation’s Web Developer Kaitlin Lee.
“If they’re already taking earmark request digitally, then have a database engineer on staff export the data tables,” Lee said.
“Senator Levin might think it’s a huge data curation process or a manual process. But if it’s already electronic, then a database engineer can write a programming script to do it. It’s a ...
Levin and Coburn, toe to toe on Earmark Transparency Bill
A Senate committee’s planned markup of an Earmark Transparency Bill was postponed until July after the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs briefly debated the bill this afternoon.
Though there was not enough committee members present to mark up the bill, that didn’t stop Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., from having a back-and-forth on the issue.
Levin said the bill could conflict with existing rules on Senate earmarks and said that aggregating thousands of earmark requests on a website would be burdensome and unworkable.
Coburn introduced the bill, S.3335, last month ...
Earmark Transparency Act reaches first Committee
The first Congressional discussion of the Earmark Transparency Act will take place today when the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs debates the bill at a business meeting at 2:30 p.m.
The bill, S.3335, was introduced last month by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and would require a centralized, detailed, downloadable database that would track every earmark that members of Congress requested.
Earmarks are federal funds provided by Congress for projects that circumvent the merit-based or competitive allocation processes or curtail the executive branch from ...
The Fundamentals
I’m pretty excited to be joining the team here at Sunlight. I’m the new Lead Organizer for the Public Equals... View Article
Continue readingReporter’s Notebook: How we got the latest FTA disappearmark data
When we first reported about how we attempted to track down disappearmarks from the Federal Transit Administration, we recounted the difficulties in getting data in an electronic format. In response to our first Freedom of Information request, we were given a 121-page printout of a database, which in the end didn’t accurately include the information we sought: which SAFETEA-LU earmarks went unspent.
When our story ran, the FTA contacted us and said that one reason that FOIA requests are often returned in a printout and not a database form is to allow for the FOIA office to redact or ...
Disappearmarks: Millions in SAFETEA-LU transit earmarks are unspent
Nearly $120 million in Federal Transit Administration earmarks that were introduced and approved by Congress have sat untouched in FTA accounts for years and have now lapsed, according to an FTA list.
The list of unallocated earmarks, which the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that funds for these projects should have been used by September 30, 2009 at the latest, but due to various reasons, were never spent. (See spreadsheet below for the full list. Some projects appear ... Continue reading
Rep. Flake Op-Ed
Thursday’s Roll Call featured a fantastic Op-Ed from Representative Jeff Flake, about ethics, earmarks, campaign contributions, and the Office of... View Article
Continue readingOrganizations Call on Members of Congress to Support the Earmark Transparency Act
Nearly 30 ideologically diverse organizations joined the Sunlight Foundation on a letter urging Members of Congress to cosponsor the Earmark... View Article
Continue readingIn House and Senate, appropriators got most contributions from earmark recipients
The Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense -- two of our favorite organizations -- have released their comprehensive earmark and influence database for fiscal year 2010 requests.
Among House members, Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., a member of the Appropriations Committee, tops the list of members who have gotten campaign contributions from earmark recipients (complete breakdown here). Interesting to note that Moran's top donor so far, Mantech International, got a $2 million earmark from the Northern Virginia congressman.
In the Senate, Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye received the most contributions from earmark beneficiaries. Inouye secured earmarks for his ...
Disappearmarks: Buffalo’s Switcheroo saves earmark
Time was running out for an $11.8 million federal earmark to redevelop the Inner Harbor of the Buffalo River where it empties into Lake Erie. Like most earmarks, the recipient – the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation – had only three years to spend the funds before the money lapsed. In Buffalo, that meant the corporation had until October 2007, or else lose it for good.
There were once grand plans for the ... Continue reading
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