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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Our earmark data-collection project has been a smashing success, and our intrepid earmark hunters have put over 34,000 earmark requests into the database.
Less than 60 members of Congress and senators remain, but the going is getting tough. Why? Because some disclosures were in the worst possible format: scanned PDFs. It’s a huge chore to make [...]
We’re at a whopping 30,000 earmark requests in our database – just crossed over that number tonight – and one of our intrepid earmark hunters finally entered the requests of Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. That means we have both Appropriations chairmen.
So let’s look at the people who [...]
With the extraordinary success we’ve had collecting earmarks, we’re starting to generate press interest, and I heard from a reporter in California today who’s looking for some egregious examples from the Golden State.
I’ve been up to my you-know-what just managing the collection of earmark data, so I’d love to have you all in the WashingtonWatch.com [...]
Our earmarks contest continues into its final leg. Earmark hunters across the country have collected over 25,000 earmark requests in our database, and the “wanted” list continues to shrink!
We are also changing the way Washington works. Last week the Office of Management and Budget in the White House announced that they would be tracking [...]
We continue to make tremendous strides with our earmark hunting effort. Transparency heroes from across the country have now put an astounding 25,000 earmarks in the database.
On our earmarks homepage, you can review earmark requests by state and by member of Congress or senator.
Using our earmarks entry form, you can put the earmark [...]
As we get closer and closer to finishing our earmarks project, there are interesting and fun ways to select whose earmarks we go after next.
How about the people who move the money around: Appropriators! These are the folks who sit on the committees that make the actual spending decisions.
The earmark requests of several appropriators aren’t [...]