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!

The Washington Post had an interesting article late last week about how hard it is for the federal government to follow the money it is spending under the Recovery Act, even though transparency and accountability were heavily doubted during debate on and passage of the bill.

Enter Onvia, a company that supplies nationwide information about opportunities to government contractors. They put up a site called Recovery.org and have rapidly outstripped the federal government’s efforts to track its own money on Recovery.gov.

Draw your own conclusions about whether a government that can’t follow the money should get the money in the first place. In fairness, the public hasn’t really asked for all that much accountability in the past, but with this Internet thing opening windows onto much more of corporate and governmental activity, it’s time to for the government to step up and get good at running its own show. You’re paying for it – a little over $3,200 per U.S. family.

The Hill reports that Members of Congress who failed to disclose their earmark requests as required by new rules in the House will still get their goodies.

Members who failed to disclose their earmarks as required by the April 4 deadline should have them rejected out of hand. But Congress makes the rules, and Congress can break the rules.

Our list of earmark requests is here. (It’s current to April 12 – let us know of updates.)

We’ll be working on getting the earmark requests into usable formats so we can have a good discussion about which are worthy of taxpayer dollars and which aren’t.

Via the Enlightened Redneck, Congress is getting a raise. In fact, they have set it up to give themselves a raise automatically, no matter what their work produces:

A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay. Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries . . . .

Be sure to note how the pay increase kicks in right after the election. For you to do something about it, you have to wait 23 months until the next election. Have no doubt, they’re clever, your representatives in Congress.

There was a bill introduced to prevent the automatic pay increase from taking effect this year, but guess what?: It didn’t go anywhere.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 5087, to prevent Members of Congress from receiving the automatic pay adjustment scheduled to take effect in 2009. Click to vote, comment, learn more, and edit the wiki article about the bill.

The new Capitol Visitor Center opens its doors tomorrow, December 2nd.

You already opened your wallet to help build it. The $621 million final price tag amounts to about $6.30 per U.S. family, or $2 per person. The original cost estimate was $265 million, with a completion date of December 2005.

But it’s going to be a real improvement for visitors to the Capitol, who have been waiting in line and suffering slow entry through cluttered doorways not designed for magnetometers and the security checks we have today.

Between the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Botanic Garden, you could spend a full day all within a few square blocks and get some real insights into the workings of the government – and some exotic plants.

The best times of year to visit are spring and early fall. You get about two weeks of nice weather between when it’s too cold and when it’s too hot and humid.

So what are you waiting for? You already paid for it! Come on check out your new Capitol Visitor Center!

The National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research is having a meeting on Friday this coming week. But the meeting is closed to the public.

The grant applications and the discussions could disclose confidential trade secrets or commercial property such as patentable material, and personal information concerning individuals associated with the grant applications, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

Grant applicants are using government funds to work on advancing their business interests, so we don’t get to know about it? And on top of that, we don’t get to know who they are?

This looks like a bunch of bunk. The meeting notice is even being published less than the 15 days prior to the meeting as required “due to the timing limitations imposed by the review and funding cycle.” Uh-huh.

But nobody pays much attention to the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research, and so they get to do stuff like this. In the dark corners of the government stuff like this goes on all the time. It’s your money. You’re paying for it.

With the drama of the election and the recent huge bailout and spending bills flying through Congress, it’s easy to forget the kajillions of little things the federal government is churning out all the time.

So here’s one that caught my eye – the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has just announced a meeting “of the General Conference Committee of the National Poultry Improvement Plan.” It’ll be held at the at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta January 28, so book your plane tickets now if you want to go.

The meeting will be open to the public, but I was disappointed to learn that the public is not allowed to participate in the discussions during the meeting. I had thought that I would share my personal poultry improvement plan, which is to cook it in some oil and spices and plop it into folded corn tortillas with a dollop of sour cream.

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This Associated Press article notes what I wrote here yesterday morning about the annual spending process and the October 1 start of the new fiscal year:

If Congress spends $700 billion this week on a financial services bailout, at least we’ll know where that money went. Before the month is out, Congress will spend hundreds of billions more on heaven-knows-what.

The AP says:

The legislation is coming together in a remarkably secretive process in which decisions are concentrated in the hands of just a few lawmakers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis. The unusual process means thousands of lawmakers’ pet projects of the very sort blasted by GOP presidential nominee John McCain on the campaign trail would escape scrutiny, including up to $5 billion worth of such “earmarks” in the defense budget alone.

Back to me:

The start of the new fiscal year is not a surprise to anyone, but Congress didn’t follow its own budget and spending processes and has created a spending mess to go along with the financial crisis.

Your Congress. Your representatives. Your crisis fatigue. You’re paying for it. Follow the action here.

With less than ten days to go before the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress hasn’t passed a single annual spending bill. Only last week, the second of twelve bills was introduced in the House. Not passed – introduced. The Senate, at least, has seen nine bills introduced, though it hasn’t passed any.

(Follow the annual budget and spending process here.)

Even before the current crisis, Congress was angling to determine spending levels for the 2009 fiscal year in a careless, ad hoc way.

Many of my friends in the government transparency movement focus on earmark reform, and it does represent the flagrant parochialism at play in politics. But earmarks are a small part of federal budget. The problems with government management are far bigger and far deeper.

If Congress spends $700 billion this week on a financial services bailout, at least we’ll know where that money went. Before the month is out, Congress will spend hundreds of billions more on heaven-knows-what.

The start of the new fiscal year is not a surprise to anyone, but Congress didn’t follow its own budget and spending processes and has created a spending mess to go along with the financial crisis.

Your Congress at work. You’re paying for it.

It’s always interesting to me when I come across government Web sites “for kids,” like:

• this one from the Environmental Protection Agency
• this one from the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory
• this one from the Patent and Trademark Office
• this one from the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration
• this one from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or
• this one from the FBI.

It’s good to have information available to kids, and I can see a White House for Kids page or a Basic Readings in Democracy (Department of State), but I wonder if a kids’ page at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a leisure that the American taxpayer might just as well forgo.

This page from the National Institutes of Health seems designed to turn all kids into worrywarts. It features a cat named “Toxie” that shows you all the dangerous chemicals and substances that can be found in people’s residences. Have a nice day, kids!

So, are “for kids” sites across the government something you think there ought to be? You’re paying for it!