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 ...
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 ...