The White House's Office of Management and Budget has added a flurry of details to a new earmark database that went live last month. Too bad the most salient information is still missing -- the names of lawmakers who crammed pork into spending bills.
Reports that the Bush administration pressured OMB director Rob Portman to keep the names of lawmakers requesting earmarks under wraps were rife in the week leading up the database's rollout on March 12. The administration wanted to limit information to reveal only reveal aggregate data by agency, no specifics. And that's what it got.
To his credit, Portman has since added plenty of interesting tidbits to the database, which tracks information on "13,496 earmarks totaling more than $19 billion for Fiscal Year 2005 appropriations." You can group earmarks by state and find details on individual pork projects such as, say, the juicy $278 million Boeing received in two earmarks for aircraft.
But there are also some glaring holes. Plenty of database entries carry vague descriptions of how American tax money is being doled out by our government. There's a mysterious "engineering activity" tag on a Lockheed Martin earmark. Two big projects totaling more than $130.8 million are marked classified. Their recipients remain unknown. So do the Members of Congress who sponsored the earmarks.
This anonymity is, at best, disingenuous. Last year, Bush signed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, a law that mandates that the recipients of earmarks be disclosed in the database (OMB has until Jan. 1 of 2008 to comply). Two mighty trough fillers, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) -- he of a "bridge to nowhere" infamy -- secretly held up the legislation. Even so, the bill made it through. What it lacked, however, was a stipulation that lawmakers behind the earmarks also be named.
Unsurprisingly, Congress in 2006 dished out a record $71.77 billion for 15,832 pork-barrel projects, according to Bloomberg news. Numbers like that make the $19 billion in earmarks the OMB claims to cover look paltry. And although Portman deserves some thanks for adding details to the database, he also offers up some sorry flackspeak in an announcement (.pdf) today about the update:
So the White House wants to make $19 billion the benchmark and cut that in half? How noble. According to 2006 figures, that would leave $62.27 billion in anonymous earmarks left over. Some progress.
Photo: David Blaine
