Congress is well behind now on passing the bills that govern spending for the 2010 fiscal year. It starts on October 1st, in just 12 short days.

As you can see from the chart to the right, Congress was supposed to have been well through the process in early summer. It’s not working out that way.

Back in May it looked like Congress might finish the appropriations process on time this year. And the House has actually passed all its spending bills. But the Senate has only passed four, and all twelve have to go to conference, where the House and Senate versions are reconciled. That’s not going to happen in twelve days. (See the status of all the FY 2010 spending bills on our “FY 2010 Spending Tracker” page.)

That means almost certainly that Congress will pass a “continuing resolution,” or a series of them, to temporarily fund the government. That’s bad for a couple of reasons: One, when they don’t have a budget for the year, federal agencies and sub-agencies can’t plan. They literally hold up many plans and programs because they don’t know if there’s money for them. Two, when Congress passes these bills in haste, lots of shenanigans can happen. In 2000, a provision was slipped into one of these big bills that ultimately helped cause the financial meltdown.

That’s what Congress is playing with when it fails to get its work done on a regular schedule. Is that alright with you? As always, you can let your representative know what you think.

I’ve been poring over the earmark request data we collected in our big contest, and working to correlate it to the earmarks that made it into bills. It’s slow going, so far . . .

But the excitement level sure builds when you take a look at what the money’s going to!

Do you have your tickets to the Pendleton Round-Up yet? It’s going on right now!

And you stand to contribute $500,000 to Pendleton Round-Up Foundation, which puts it on, thanks to an earmark in the Senate version of H.R. 3288, The Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010.

Senator Wyden (D-OR) requested $3.5 million for the facility where the rodeo is held. Senator Merkley (D-OR) requested a modest $365,000.

The report for the bill has the federal government sending $500,000 to the Pendleton Round-Up Foundation for “reconstruction and construction needs of facilities which are critical to the local economy.” That’s right: The folks in Pendleton, Oregon want you to send them a half-million bucks for their “critical-to-the-local-economy” rodeo ring.

The people in Pendleton probably love their rodeo, and they’re entitled to! But it’s an open question whether they should be entitled to use your money in putting it on. For my part, I say horse hockey!

It looks like some of Rep. Tom Latham’s ag earmarks are not in the database.

Update: Got ‘em!

It’s one of those awful scanned PDFs, but if you can get the missing ones in . . . .

Here are the earmarks we have for him, and you can always download the whole dataset here.

Update: Same goes for Roscoe Bartlett. His non-defense earmarks aren’t in the database yet.

Update: Frank Kratovil’s earmarks are not in the database—the entries in the database are not earmarks! (We’ll be taking care of that.)

Update: About 25 of Rep. Jim McDermott’s earmarks seem to be missing from the database. I’m at a loss to figure out which ones.

Update: Missing from our collection of Tim Holden earmarks: the second half of his ten Agriculture earmarks—that is, 6-10, starting at the bottom of page 2—and the first, fourth, and fifth of his Interior earmarks. Scanned PDFs—oh joy.

Update: It looks like Senator Patty Murray’s transportation earmarks didn’t make it in the database.

Update: We seem to have mostly missed Michigan’s senators. For Carl Levin, we have only his Ag earmarks. For Debbie Stabenow (scroll to the bottom of the page), we have just ten of her Ag earmarks. The two submitted some of their requests jointly, so open up two windows and enter the data for both at the same time!

Update: Senator Ben Cardin published two lists of earmarks a short list and a full list. It looks like we’ve only got the earmarks from the short list, and we need the full list.

There are amazing similarities between human genes and the gene structure of other creatures.

But you have something more in common with the catfish than you may have known. Congress wants you to pay to map the catfish genome.

Representative Mike D. Rogers (R-AL) requested $1,250,000 in the agriculture spending bill for fiscal 2010 for research on the catfish genome. As passed by the House, the ag spending bill includes $819,000 for this project.

Is catfish gene research a boondoggle? It might sound like it. The folks at Auburn University’s Catfish Genome Project don’t think so. The question is whether it’s something you should pay for.

Here’s the current vote on Congressman Rogers’ request and, below that, the agriculture spending bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the earmark and the bill.

ArsTechnica has a great write-up of our earmarks project and a top earmark hunter, Andi Osiek.

Back from vacation and digging out, I will be furiously working over the weekend to check the data we collected, flag earmarks that made it into bills, and award the prizes to the top earmark hunters in our contest.

Stay tuned!

Our hard-working earmark hunters have put over 41,000 earmarks into the database, and our “wanted” list has NO more members listed on it!

There has been an amazing outpouring of effort to capture all this earmark data. Congratulations and thanks to all our earmark hunters!

Now, we’re not completely done yet . . . .

We may have only gotten partial lists of earmarks from some representatives, such as when earmark hunters stopped in the middle. If you find any members of Congress and senators who have more earmark disclosures than we have in our data, we might be missing some. Put ‘em in the database!

And with so many people trying to interpret the sometimes very confusing earmark requests that our representatives disclosed, we’re going to have to do some work on quality control. Of course you can help, by downloading the data (34MB! – save as CSV and ) and sifting through it for duplicates, earmarks that aren’t for fiscal year 2010, or other anomalies.

Some members of Congress put their transportation earmarks and other earmarks in authorizing bills on the same pages as their appropriations earmarks. These are not the earmarks we were trying to collect. Press releases where they take credit for federal spending are not earmarks either.

Whatever you find, please report it to us. Be specific: Include the earmark’s number and what is wrong with it. We’ll investigate and correct the record, eliminate duplicates, etc.

Your humble webmaster will be on vacation this week—a real vacation, without Internet access—so please forgive delayed replies or late-coming fixes to the tics you find in the data.

We’re working on a system to connect the earmarks that have been approved to the bills they’ve been put into. During the month of September, WashingtonWatch.com will be earmark review central, while Americans like you sort through them and decide which ones you like and which ones you don’t—such as this one!

And, of course, we’ll soon announce the winners of the big earmark contest! You can get a pretty good idea of how things will probably come out from the latest contest update.

Among the 40,000 earmark requests submitted by members of Congress is a $10,000,000 earmark for a medical facility in Ashdod, Israel.

This prompts a commenter to ask, “And what do U.S. taxpayers get in return for this $10,000,000 investment?”

The request is by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D) of New York’s fifth district. A 501(c)(3) group called American Friends of Ashdod Medical Center is located in Brooklyn, New York.

Ashdod is the fifth largest city in Israel, with about 207,000 inhabitants. The thing is . . . most of those people are probably not Americans. They’re likely to be, oh . . . , Israelis? The benefit to American taxpayers from such a payout is at least subject to question.

What do you think? Is spending $10,000,000 on a medical facility in Israel a good idea in your view?

Here’s the current vote on that earmark. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about it.

The database has over 40,000 earmarks and the “wanted” list is dwindling fast. In fact, at this writing, there are only three representatives left. This will be the last contest update before we announce the winners.

Here’s how things will proceed. When it looks like we have all the earmark requests in the database, we’ll do some review and quality control. It may be as much as a week because your humble webmaster is taking some summer vacation time. (Sorry about that.) Then, we’ll announce our winners, pop the champagne corks, and . . . go back to work!

Our team of eager database people are building a process to flag the earmark requests that have actually made it into bills. Hopefully we’ll quickly add much more information to our collection of earmark requests. The month of September is an important month, because by October 1 Congress must pass all 12 spending bills—earmarks and all. We’re really going to put this data to use!

In the contest, “ArtsyAndi” continues to hold the top spot, and “doi76″ holds on to second again this week. Remaining in command of the third spot is “lgist.”

These earmarks hunters—and everyone who entered data—deserve our thanks and praise. They are showing the elected officials in Washington that earmarks are something the American people want to see, and say something about.

To briefly recap the contest rules, when we’ve tallied the final results, the person who has entered the most earmarks will win an Amazon Kindle; number two gets an iPod Shuffle; and number three wins a regular deluxe fruitcake! The contest continues until we have collected all congressional earmarks or October 1st, the beginning of the new fiscal year. It’ll end very soon.

But here again are the current standings!

#1 – to win an Amazon Kindle: ArtsyAndi
#2 – to win an iPod Shuffle: doi76
#3 – to win a deluxe regular fruitcake: lgist
#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

(current to the morning of Sunday afternoon, August 30th.)

Again, the important thing is that this project will make available to millions of Americans how their money is spent in Washington, D.C. Together we are improving the way our government works. Thank you to everyone participating in the contest, and thank you to those of you taking care of just one or two local representatives and senators.

Maybe this is why Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) wasn’t too eager to put his earmark disclosures out in a useful form—so uneager that he was tops in our earmark disclosure hall of shame.

Cochran made 637 earmark requests. Six hundred thirty-seven. That’s one senator, making more earmark requests than many entire states’ delegations.

Take a look and decide for yourself what you think of them. It isn’t wasteful spending just because it’s an earmark. But it might be.

Just five days ago, I was excited to report that fewer than 100 members of Congress and Senators remained on our “wanted” list, and that 30,000 earmarks were in the database.

Well, today we’ve crossed below 50 wanted representatives, and there are more than 35,000 earmarks in the database. This is a tribute to the hard work of Americans who want to see the earmark process under control.

They’ve already succeeded, in one sense. The precedent we’ve set here will be carried on by the Office of Management and Budget in the White House next year.

As we near completion of the data collection phase, we’ll start to spend time on data quality—culling out any duplicates, correcting errors, and so on. (It’s a pretty conscientious group entering data, so I doubt we’ll encounter huge problems.)

Then we’ll tag the earmark requests that have been granted—the ones that have shown up in legislation (like this one!). These are the ones to focus on between now and the time the annual spending bills pass. (Fiscal year 2010 starts October 1st.)

In the end, we will have opened a huge window onto the earmarks ecosystem and the spending habits of Congress. Congratulations are already due to our earmark hunters, who have laid the foundation for some real insights into this process. Now we’ve got to get just this last fifty . . . .