By Susan Ferrechio
Chief Congressional Correspondent
The $410 billion government spending bill the House will vote on Thursday is stuffed full of earmarks, says the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The group has been scouring the bill for pork and by their estimation, there are 8,570 pet spending items worth $7.7 billion. But the good news is that Congress will spend $500 million less on earmarks in fiscal 2009, compared to fiscal 2008, according to the group.
The earmarks estimate provided by TCS, however, is about $4 billion higher than the number provided by the House Appropriations Committee, which authored the spending bill. The group says the committee did not include line-item spending from “project-based accounts” like the hundreds of projects in the Army Corps of Engineers budget and many operations and maintenance projects assigned to the president, even though George W. Bush never asked for them in his fiscal 2009 budget request.
The group said their tally could go higher because it only includes disclosed earmarks and that they plan to dig up potentially billions more in pet projects that are not attached to any lawmaker. The group last year dug up $3.5 billion in undisclosed earmarks.
