It is highly doubtful that even a handful of the senators and representatives who ultimately vote on the $825 billion Obama/Reid/Pelosi economic stimulus package will have actually read all 334 pages of the bill. But that won’t prevent many of their constituents from poring over the contents of this legislative Christmas tree, which have been posted on the Internet. The daunting task of digging into the stimulus legislation has been made easier by a coalition of think tanks and activists groups organized on the ReadtheStimulus.org web site. At latest count, the coalition’s members include The Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Club for Growth, RedState.com, FreedomWorks, Lighthouse, Americans for Prosperity, and #TCOT.

Members of the coalition are both studying the bill in detail and jointly creating a searchable public database of the spending projects they find. They have also created online tools for helping everybody who wants to read and comment on the text. ReadtheStimulus.org is thus an online demonstration of crowd-sourcing – posting on the Internet an important document in order to enlist the knowledge, experience and analytical skills of legions of interested people. The web site also provides a publicly accessible forum in which readers of the bill can share and discuss their findings. Crowd-sourcing is potentially among the most powerful tools available to taxpayers for increasing the transparency and accountability of Congress.