President Obama signed the big omnibus spending bill into law this week – earmarks and all. But he says it won’t happen again.
Here’s the heart of his earmark reform pledge.
Earmarks must have a legitimate and worthy public purpose. Earmarks that members do seek must be aired on those members’ websites in advance, so the public [...]
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And with another couple days at it, the Senate has cleared the big omnibus spending bill and it goes to the President for his signature. He is sure to sign it as funding for most of the government runs out if he doesn’t.
Spending per U.S. family [...]
Funding for the regular operations of most of the government was running out late last week, and a bill to finish out the fiscal year was heading to final passage. But there were upwards of 9,000 earmarks in that bill, and that didn’t sit right with a lot of people. (Last fall, Congress funded the [...]
When Congress didn’t complete the annual spending process back in September, it passed a temporary spending bill to run most of the government through to today. Well, it’s today now! And Congress hasn’t figured out what the government’s spending should be for the rest of the year.
It had been working on an omnibus spending bill [...]
Though we usually use the committee report filed with spending bills in our cost calculations, no report has been filed for the big spending bill which passed the House today.
News reports and informal reports from Capitol Hill consistently report the cost of the bill at $410 billion. (This is lower than the [...]
Introduced yesterday and up on the site today, the omnibus spending bill is H.R. 1105.
We’ve been waiting to get a look at it for weeks. The version posted online yesterday was in a hard-to-use format, but it is now available in at least a printer-friendly format. (Go here and click on “read the bill.”)
No [...]
The $500 billion omnibus spending bill to fund the most of federal government for the rest of the year will be debated in the House this week. And it has now finally been posted online.
It’s a PDF of scanned pages, meaning it can’t be searched or parsed in any other way. All 1,133 [...]
It’s probably hard to keep all the recent government spending straight, so let’s briefly review:
Late last summer, the Bush Administration started pushing the huge bailout bill, now known as TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It included about $3,000 per family in spending. And we’ve blogged the wazoo out of it here.
While [...]