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.