At a time when the United States is starved for genuine bipartisanship in Congress, the Earmark Transparency Act (ETA) of 2010 should be as welcome as a bottle of spring water to a man lost in the desert. Earmarks are special-interest legislative provisions senators and representatives use to direct tax dollars to favored recipients. Earmarks are typically obscure provisions in must-pass spending bills, so individual items rarely get a specific up-or-down vote. Last year, Congress approved more than 9,000 earmarks worth an estimated $16 billion. The lead co-sponsors of the ETA include Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Sens. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Introduced in May, the bill has attracted a lengthy list of Senate co-sponsors, including 11 Republicans and eight Democrats. The co-sponsors span the ideological spectrum from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC. Nonprofits from Americans for Tax Reform to the Sunlight Foundation also support the ETA.
President Obama is not listed as a co-sponsor, of course, but he might as well be, having challenged Congress during his State of the Union address in January to “publish all earmark requests on a single Web site before there’s a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.” Coburn and Obama have a notable history of working together to make government spending more transparent, having co-sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 — aka “Coburn-Obama” — that put most federal spending within a few mouse clicks on the Internet at USASpending.gov.
