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96 senators post their earmarks online
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
05/19/09 3:23 PM EDT
One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital is Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation. Bill is a former investigative reporter and has for the past three years at Sunlight been a leader in the trans-partisan movement for greater transparency and accountability in government.
He didn't get much sleep Tuesday night because he spent most of it tracking down what every current member of the U.S. Senate did to satisfy a requirement that they post their earmark rquests on their official web sites. The rules don't say how those requests are to be formatted, so, as Allison found in doing the same exercise with House members, there are almost as many ways to post senators' earmarks as there are senators.
But Bill persevered and the results are here for everybody to share. He has also helpfully loaded the results in a Google Documents spreadsheeet.
As he notes: "They labeled them as funding priorities, programs and project requests, investments in their states and, in just one case, earmarks. They posted image files that can’t be cut and pasted, tables, single files with every item or dozens of files for each individual item."
It will be more difficult to do than it should be, thanks to the senators lack of uniform posting formats, but just having the information in some accessible format assures that these earmarks will get far more examination and analysis than has ever before been the case with such requests.
Thanks, Bill.
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