Congress didn’t finish the annual spending process by the beginning of the new fiscal year October 1st. It has passed some of the bills that run the government, but most of the government has been running on temporary spending measures, called “continuing resolutions.”

Here’s a run-down of the action so far:

On October 1st, the Legislative Branch appropriations act became law. It spent money to run Congress for the year, and contained a continuing resolution through the end of October. Cost per family of that bill: about $1,785.

On October 16, the Agriculture appropriations bill became law, funding—you guessed it—the Department of Agriculture from then through the end of the fiscal year. Cost: $1,178.

Twelve days later, on October 28, the Energy and Water bill and the Homeland Security bill became law. Cost: $319 and $414 respectively.

And at the end of October, with the first continuing resolution expiring, Congress passed and the president signed the Interior appropriations bill, which contained a second continuing resolution.

With spending for the year on the Department of the Interior and all the other agencies of government through December 18, that bill came to $2,560 per U.S. family.

The bills that remain (and the spending in them from mid-December through the fiscal year) are:

• Commerce/Justice/State appropriations: $569
• Defense appropriations: $5,147
• Financial Services approps: $319
  (Senate version: $371)
• Labor/HHS/Education approps: $6,162
• Military Construction and Veterans Affairs approps: $1,021
  (Senate version: $1,033)
• State/Foreign Operations approps: $379
  (Senate version: )
• Transportation/HUD: $1,071

So there you have it! The very latest on the annual spending process.

Sure would have been nice for Congress to finish it on time. But it never seems to do that.

I was excited when I saw that S. 1808 had been introduced. The description given to it by its author was that it would “control Federal spending now,” and its short title is the “Control Spending Now Act.”

To think, spending would come under control—NOW!

But I waited to see the text of the bill, because anything that controlled federal spending now would be a big change. Spending is soaring, and Congress seems to be too busy working on health care legislation to manage how it’s going to spend money in fiscal year 2010, which started about a month ago.

So, does S. 1808 control federal spending NOW? . . .

Would you settle for soon?

The bill attacks earmarks, tries to recreate a line-item veto, restores “pay-as-you-go” requirements (meaning new spending has to be funded somehow), changes the budget process, and goes after corporate welfare, subsidies, and stuff.

Sounds good! Passage of this bill would control federal spending soon! Hopefully!

Here’s the current vote on S. 1808, the Control Spending Now Act. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

Fiscal year 2010 began October 1st, but Congress is still hashing through its decisions about spending for the year. Let’s review.

When Congress failed to finish the spending process by the first of this month, it passed one of the twelve appropriations bills with a provision continuing the operations of the rest of the government for all of October.

This brought the cost of the legislative branch spending bill to about $1,850 per U.S. family. (Spending on the operations of Congress—what the bill funds—is about $35. The rest of that spending is for the operation of the government during October.)

So far here in October, Congress has passed three more of the annual spending bills. On the 16th, President Obama signed the agriculture spending bill which spent just short of $1,200 per U.S. family.

Congress passed the energy and water and homeland security bills and sent them to the president last week. He is likely to sign them, spending about $316 and $440 per U.S. family respectively.

That leaves the Commerce/Justice/science bill ($665), the Defense bill ($6,000), financial services ($430), interior and environment ($320), Labor/HHS/Education ($7,200), military/veterans ($1,200), state/foreign operations ($443), and transportation/HUD ($1,250).

By week’s end, Congress is likely to pass another continuing resolution, as it is unlikely to finish all these bills by the end of the month.

That’s the message Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is sending when he ridicules this earmark, according to Huffington Post reporter Jason Linkins. The earmark would accelerate the renovation and replacement of the pier historically used to berth the Coast Guard Training Vessel EAGLE at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

Requested at $7,700,000 by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), this project is funded at $300,000 in the homeland security appropriations bill.

“[T]he ‘Eagle’ is an an old ‘three masted barque,’” writes Linkin, “that is the only ‘active (operational) commissioned sailing vessel in the U.S. maritime services.’ . . . [T]his sounds like a cool thing to fund.”

What do you think? Is $300,000 dollars for a pier for a fancy boat an extravagance we can’t afford with so many other priorities before the government? Or is it, as Linkin says, a cool thing to fund?

Here is the current vote on the earmark request Senator Dodd put in. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the earmark.

Yesterday, a couple of resolutions were introduced in the House that I think are noteworthy. Many resolutions have no substance—recognizing “National Brush Your Teeth Day” and such—so we don’t even display them. But the ones that do something we display.

And we are displaying H. Res. 385. It would require congressional committees to publish bills within 24 hours after they have amended them.

Often today, a committee will amend and pass a bill, preparing it for the House floor, but it won’t give the public a look at the changes it made to the bill. Uncool.

Committee practice today is to post no bills. That should end. Kudos to all the members of Congress who cosponsored this resolution. Next, let’s talk about standard formats for posting those bills…

Because the great downfall of congressional earmark reform so far has been the fact that members of Congress and senators posted their earmark requests in all kinds of different formats, with no standard organization at all.

Our incredible earmarks project has compiled earmark requests, if imperfectly, in one searchable database, but this is no substitute for Congress getting it right from the beginning.

But I don’t think calling a committee together to talk about it is needed. That’s why I’m unimpressed with H. Con. Res. 201, which would establish a “select committee on earmark reform.” I suspect such a committee would absorb a lot of energy and produce very little.

Congress, why don’t you publish earmarks in standardized formats from the beginning? We’ll do the rest, the American people.

H. Con. Res. 201 gets a shrug of the shoulders and a “meh” from me.

But what matters is what you think. Here are the current votes on H. Res. 385, requiring congressional committees to publish bills within 24 hours after they have amended them, and H. Con. Res. 201, creating a select committee on earmark reform.

That’s the allegation made by a commenter on Rep. Bart Stupak’s (MI-1) requests for $1,900,000 to go to Advenovation, Inc.

The money would fund “research to combine robotics technology, machine vision and sensors with software to create platform-independent robots with advanced vision and sensing capability.” Sounds neat!

But is the proposed recipient a legitimate, reliable business? The public is entitled to investigate.

A comment posted yesterday—apparently by the owner of Advenovation—argues that the allegations about the company are false and that another company is at fault for alleged nonpayments.

What more can we learn about this earmark and the proposed recipient? That’s up to you, America. Anyone who knows something about this is welcome to comment or edit the wiki article about the proposed earmark.

In the meantime, here’s the current vote on it. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article.

When it started back in mid-July, I had no idea of the response our earmark hunting contest would get. But people showed up to this party! Earmarks have definitely touched a nerve across the country.

With the help of some good articles and blog posts, and plenty of word of mouth, people went to work chasing down the earmark requests that members of Congress and senators were required to post online this year. They posted them in such an odd collection of formats that the data was no good.

By collecting them in our database, we made this information useful. Now you can sort earmark requests by state and member of Congress/senator. Take a look at who your representative is seeking dollars for.

Have we finished the job? Not entirely. We’re still working to correlate the earmarks that were requested to the earmarks that made it into bills. Approved earmarks were reported without any reliable link to requests, so there are a lot of judgment calls about which earmark requests were granted.

Our data is also imperfect. We’re still missing a few earmark requests, for example, and some earmarks were entered in our database multiple times. But on the whole, we’ve brought a lot more transparency to the earmarking process.

Take a look at the Commerce/Justice/Science spending bill. All the Senate earmarks are in there—and there are a lot!

Best of all, our example has been recognized by the White House. The Office of Management and Budget announced in August that it would track earmarks starting with the next budget cycle. They can do a better job of requiring and tracking earmark requests all the way through the process.

But let’s talk about those top earmark hunters! They and many others invested an extraordinary amount of time so that all Americans could have a more transparent government. The winners cited below—and everyone who helped out—deserve our thanks and praise.

So let’s get to the thanking and praising! The winners are . . .

Top of the heap—by quite a margin—is “ArtsyAndi.” Andrea Osiek is a 29-year-old new mom. She and her husband Jason live in Joplin, Missouri. They met online in 2002 and were married in June 2005.

For the past five years, Andi has worked as the Marketing and Public Information Director for Economic Security Corporation, an anti-poverty not-for-profit in Southwest Missouri. It was this work that contributed to her interest in earmark reporting.

“Our agency runs over 37 assistance programs for homeless and low-income individuals and families,” she told me, adding that none of them are earmarked. “If we can eradicate excessive (and unnecessary) spending, it will free up more money for programs who work hard to prove their value. On both a professional and personal level, mandatory and truly transparent reporting just seems to make sense.”

I couldn’t have said it better. Andi entered over 13,500 earmarks in our database. Ars Technica featured her in a story on our earmarks project (using her maiden name, Brown).

Andi is also the co-founder of (and web designer for) a Kansas City-based web site called BabyBumps.net. Go there now! Tell all your friends!

Our second place winner prefers to remain anonymous (and I didn’t lean on him for info like I did Andi). The iPod shuffle goes to “doi76.”

His brief comment about the contest? “I am glad I could be a part of it. It was interesting to see how the money will be wasted.”

Doi76 entered over 8,500 earmark requests.

Third place—the deluxe fruitcake—goes to “lgist.” His motivation for participating was his firm commitment to public service, which has deepened since the loss of his daughter, and he asked that recognition for his work go to her memory. He entered more than 6,000 earmark requests. We thank him for his work and offer our condolences on his profound loss.

On the lighter side, lgist asked that his winnings be donated back to WashingtonWatch.com or delivered to the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I may just send that fruitcake over to the capitol!

The remaining honorable mentions in our contest are:

#4 – Transparency Guru: curlymanster
#5 – Open Government Maven: sdwalker
#6 – Accountability Czar: ZachV
#7 – Earmark Stalker: bgarst
#8 – Pursuer of Good Government: bias
#9 – Congressional Conscience: HansP
#10 – Fully Qualified Data Entry Clerk: jwbjerk

Again, thanks to everyone who participated in the contest. The project will make available to millions of Americans information about how their money is spent in Washington, D.C. Together we are improving the way our government works. Thanks to the White House commitment to take this project over, here’s to not doing it again next year!

Since the wrap-up of our earmark hunting contest, we have been linking the 40,000+ earmark requests to the earmarks that made it into bills.

It’s a time-consuming and imperfect process, but we have done pretty much all of them in the Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill, which goes to the Senate floor this week.

Take a look at the bill. In the “Learn More” box, you’ll see a line that says:

See Earmarks Included in this Bill:

Click below that to load the list of earmarks in the CJS bill.

A couple of notes about what you’ll see:

• Some earmarks are listed twice (or even more times than that) because they were requested by two (or more) Senators. This is so that you can click on each request that has made it into a bill. Be sure not to add up all the earmarks listed—you’ll get more than the total amount of dollars being earmarked!
• Also, not every single earmark is in there. There are some earmarks for which we couldn’t find the request on which it is based. This might be because of errors in our data, or because earmarks got in the bill without being publicly requested. We’ll continue to investigate and late you know.

We’ll continue to connect earmark requests to the spending bills that Congress is working on.

You can take a look at earmarks going to your area on our earmarks map. What do you think of them? You can vote on them, comment, or edit the wiki article for each earmark.

Hey, while you’re at it: How about telling a friend? More Americans need to get a look at how members of Congress and senators send money home. Sometimes, in our opinion, they may be using it to glorify themselves just a bit too much. (Please only email people you are fairly confident would be interested in this info. Don’t be a spammer.)

We’re just delighted that the Office of Management and Budget in the White House is going to capture this data next year. Congress kept this data pretty obscure, even while they claimed to make it transparent. The government can do much better than this in the next budget cycle.

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) appears to have no qualms about congratulating himself for how he spends your money. This year, he requested a $10,000,000 earmark to fund a grant program for Iowa schools. It was funded at $7,000,000 in the Senate version of H.R. 3293, the Labor/HHS spending bill for fiscal 2010.

The “Harkin Grant Program” he calls it. Such modesty.

But it should be called the “Harper Grant Program,” the “Smith Grant Program,” or whatever your last name is. It’s not Senator Harkin’s money, after all.

Here’s the current vote on Senator Harkin’s $10,000,000 earmark. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about this earmark.

The House and Senate have agreed on a compromise version of H.R. 2918, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2010. That’s the bill that funds the Congress for the coming fiscal year (at just under $40 per U.S. family).

When the House passed it today, it included a “continuing resolution” that permits the rest of the government to keep running even in the absence of bills that specifically spend money on government operations. The current fiscal year ends at midnight on September 30th, but the continuing resolution lets the government keep going through the end of October.

Incidentally, the bill included the one earmark that was attached to the Senate legislative branch appropriations bill. We named Senator Ben Nelson’s (D-NE) earmark for the Durham Museum “Earmark Zero” because . . . —well, I guess because it sounds interesting!

Voters here on the site may not like it, but America didn’t disapprove of this earmark, and there it is in the bill, funded at the level Senator Nelson requested: $200,000. Plan on a visit to the Durham Museum’s photo archive project if you’re ever in Omaha.

During the month of October we’ll continue to add to our earmarks database. You can see which earmarks made it into some of the spending bills at this point. You can follow the spending bills on our “FY 2010 Spending Tracker” page.