Congress plays hide-and-seek with earmarks

On his official House Web site, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., writes about economic development and job creation.

 

He begins with his personal story when, as a young man, the Kentucky native had to leave home and move to Cincinnati just to find work. Rogers then devotes several paragraphs to his efforts build a robust local economy for his district, so that Southern Kentuckians will have opportunities closer to home. He closes the page this way: “A list of the programs that I am proud to support for 2010 can be viewed here.”

 

A link at the very bottom of the page, helpfully labeled “Link,” leads to a 22-page-long, unsearchable PDF file—posted sideways—that lists Rogers’ 103 earmark requests that, if approved, will cost taxpayers more than $460 million and fund entities ranging from a Kentucky firm that makes transmission pans for helicopters to an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit that develops anti-theft devices for automobiles.

 

Though his earmark requests are buried at the bottom of an inside page of his Web site, unlabeled, unsearchable and posted sideways, Rogers has fully complied with new earmark disclosure rules.

 

And at least Rogers’ requests, though buried, were there: The Sunlight Foundation surveyed congressional web sites and was unable to find earmark disclosures on the sites of some 120 members.

 

In January 2009, Rep. David Obey, D-WI, and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-HI – respectively, chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees – required members of Congress, for the first time, to publish all their requests for earmarks on their official Web sites.

 

Obey said the reforms would mean that earmarks, which lawmakers use to direct funds to projects and recipients of their choice without executive branch review or competitive bidding, would now “face greater public scrutiny, and members of Congress will have more time and access to more information before they vote on bills and as they prepare amendments.”

 

Given the numerous scandals and boondoggles that earmarks have spawned over the years – Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-CA, went to jail in part for trading them for bribes, former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK,  committed hundreds of millions to building bridges to nowhere, and now the FBI is investigating PMA Group, a lobbying firm that specialized in raising campaign cash for more than 100 House members who gave earmarks to its clients—more scrutiny is essential, and Obey and Inouye deserve credit for trying to enable it. But to scrutinize, one has to be able to find the lists of earmarks first.

 

Representatives had to post their requests online before they submitted their earmark requests to the House Appropriations Committee. The deadline for submission was Friday, April 3, at 5 p.m.; when the committee’s computer crashed, the deadline was extended 24 hours.

 

That Saturday afternoon, I began examining the 433 official Web sites of House members, looking for those posted lists of earmark requests. In two days of eye-blearing work, I found more than 290 of them.

 

Most were relatively easy to find, even if I had to peck through two or three links to get to them. Dozens were challenging, in part because members labeled the disclosures inconsistently.

 

I saw everything from “community funding projects” (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) to “Eastern WA (Washington) Budget Requests” (Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.) to “Honest & Transparent Government” (Rep. Harry Teague, D-NM).

 

I posted my findings and a database with all the links I could find Monday morning; since then, congressional staffers have sent me a dozen or more links to requests made by their bosses.

 

While I’ve updated my database, Taxpayers for Common Sense have posted their own list (they couldn’t find 71 disclosures after their best efforts). Like me, they’ve had to rely on staffers emailing links to fill in the gaps.

 

There is a simple way for Congress to fix this: Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees maintain internal databases of earmark requests. Publish those on the committee’s Web site with a good search engine.

 

Rather than have 535 members disclosing earmarks in 535 different places, we could have two points of disclosure. Then, instead of scrutinizing where members are posting, we could concentrate on the substance of what’s being requested.

 

Bill Alison is a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, and blogs at realtime.sunlightprojects.org.