The new fiscal year starts on October 1st. That’s less than two weeks away. And almost a full slate of spending bills for the coming year have been introduced in the Senate. That’s right—the Senate has only just begun working on spending plans for the new fiscal year. The House has introduced a mere two [...]
Judging by his earmark disclosures, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) seems to have said “To hell with you!” to the Senate Appropriations Committee and its earmarking rules. But the committee is doling out money to him anyway. It seems rules were made to be broken. In March, the committee issued a press release reiterating its rules [...]
. . . except for the big ones. The Senate Appropriations Committee has really gotten into gear in the last couple of weeks, moving eight of the twelve spending bills that are supposed to pass by October 1st. But it hasn’t moved the Defense or Labor/HHS bills, which are consistently the biggest of the bunch—more [...]
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same. So, great. You can go [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
UPDATE: Prior to submitting this note, I tested Senator Murkowski’s appropriations links in both Internet Explorere and Firefox. However, other visitors to Murkowski’s find the links live, and I am able to access them on a different computer than I usually use. Accordingly, Senator Murkowski should not be treated as an earmarks scofflaw! She, like [...]
This past week, President Obama introduced his budget for fiscal year 2010. He proposes federal spending of just over $3.5 trillion. Unfortunately, the dollars he expects the government to bring in add up to just under $2.4 trillion, leaving a deficit of just under $1.2 trillion. Let’s break those numbers down. Under the new budget: [...]