LegiStorm, the sister company of the for-profit Storming Media, provides information about the U.S. Congress to the public. In line with their goal to make Congress more transparent, they have just launched an earmark database using 2008 data from Taxpayers for Common Sense. Taxpayers’ data is currently displayed via a massive Excel spreadsheet. LegiStorm has integrated the data with their other data sets, creating this helpful tool to shine light on congressional and executive spending. LegiStorm says they will add the earmark spending data for 2009 after the budget process is complete.

The site allows you to easily learn earmark details such as who the sponsoring members are, which were sponsored by the president, all the earmarks designated to each state, what organizations received the funds, and what bills authorized each earmark. It also lists the number and dollar amounts each state received (Virginia just edged out Texas and California for the top in earmark dollars), the number and amounts designated by each member, a listing of the most expensive earmarks, top receiving organizations, as well as a list of “airdropped earmarks,” an earmark that is not included in the original legislation as approved by either the House or Senate but is later mysteriously inserted into the conference committee reports, which combine both chambers’ versions of the bill.

Sunlight is working with Taxpayers to build a site that will allow users to more easily search their earmark data too. And in the meantime congrats to them for completely making their data available to LegiStorm. And thanks, LegiStorm, for making this data more accessible.

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The federal court case against U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska continues in Washington, D.C. Federal prosecutors accuse the long-serving lawmaker of lying on Senate forms to conceal more than $250,000 in renovations on his home in Alaska and other gifts from a former chief of an oil services company. According to our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS), every charge brought against the Senator relates to his failure to disclose gifts and debts on his Senate financial disclosure form. It’s critical to the public’s right to know “where and from whom our public servants receive gifts, loans, and payments,” as TCS writes. “The government, in its opening statement and throughout the trial, has maintained that the public right to know is an important element in this case and that Stevens’ failure to disclose was a breach of this right.”

TCS reports that Stevens’ defense attorneys are arguing that the public’s right to know is not relevant since the prosecution’s charges fall under the False Statements Act, which carries criminal penalties but applies only to statements made to government.  They argue that these laws deal only with disclosure to the Senate. The defense say that prosecutors could press the public right to know provision under the Ethics in Government Act, which carries only civil penalty. The judge presiding in the case has yet to rule on the matter.

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Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that federal prosecutors now allege Sen. Ted Stevens’ turned a $5,000 real estate investment into a $129,000 profit. The full document, courtesy of Taxpayers, is here.

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Some 76 members of Congress provide at least some disclosure of their fiscal year 2009 earmark requests online, citizen researchers have found. The majority posted their requests to their official congressional Web sites while 11 disclosed their earmark requests directly to the media–a complete list is available here.

We also learned that 46 members of Congress have foregone earmarks for fiscal year 2009. Ten members of Congress told researchers they will not disclose their earmark requests to the public, preferring to keep their constituents in the dark. Those are the findings of a collaborative study by citizen journalists organized by the Sunlight Foundation, and joined by our friends at Citizens Against Government Waste and Taxpayers for Common Sense — thanks to both organizations for their help.

To create more transparency about the earmarking process, we asked citizens to call their members of Congress and ask if they’d voluntarily disclose their fiscal year 2009 earmark requests. Sunlight has the full list, we’ll update it if more members release their earmark requests.

In the meantime, you can peruse the list to see who requested
$5,000,000 for Archer Daniels Midland to evaluate solid fats in the American diet, who asked for a $15 million earmark for defense contractors L3 Titan Group, MBDA, Raytheon and Boeing, or who requested some $300,000 to fix a parking garage in Punta Gorda, Fla. An important note: These members had the integrity to inform the public of what there spending requests were — we can question their priorities and criticize their choices, but we should acknowledge their openness.

There are 413 members who don’t want you to know what they’re asking for, who don’t want any criticism of their choices. They’re the ones who deserve the most criticism.

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It’s earmark season–the time of year when the House and Senate Appropriations Committees approve the major spending bills that fund the government, and start rolling out the lists of earmarks in the reports that accompany each bill. While who’s asking for what in this earmark el Dorado on the Potomac is already known to the insiders on the Appropriations Committee, the public is left in the dark. National Journal’s CongressDaily recently reported that the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee knows there are about 100 earmarks in their bill, how much they cost, and who asked for them, but chooses not to share that information just yet. The public, apparently, will have to wait until the subcommittee is ready to share its spending handiwork.

So let’s see if, while we’re waiting for the official disclosures from the committees, we can prevail upon members to be a bit more forthcoming. Sunlight, in conjunction with Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste is asking for your help to reveal which lawmakers post their earmark requests online.

There are a small number of lawmakers—some 46 of them—who have posted some information about their earmark requests to their official Web sites. We are providing a list of them that includes links to the their requests. We also list the names of 46 other members who say they won’t request any earmarks. Is your member listed? If not, why not? Call your members of Congress and ask them to fully disclose all their earmark requests for next year’s budget on their official Web sites. After you have spoken with your lawmakers (or, most likely, their staff), use the embedded form as to what they said and we’ll update the chart on daily basis.

We think, at a bare minimum, lawmakers–both Senators and Representatives–should release the same information that House rules require them to send to the Appropriations Committee. They should disclose the recipient of the earmark, a description of the project the earmark would fund, and the address of the recipient. They should additionally disclose the amount of money they asked for. See if you can get them to post a list, or find out why they choose not to, then let us know what you find. Be sure to include the name of the person you spoke to in the office.

Lawmakers have broad discretion on the requests they make for earmarks, and often justify them by saying earmarks serve their constituents. So we encourage constituents to call their members and ask what’s being done to benefit them. (To look up contact information for Senators, go here, and you can find contact info for Representatives click here, then click your state, then the member’s name, and go to the member’s site.

(For a definition of earmarks, see Section 521 of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, available here.

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Taxpayers for Common Sense has released the ultimate compendium of 2008 earmarks available for download, accompanied by an authoritative report on the 110th Congress’ earmarking practices and proclivities. I found this bit particularly noteworthy:

Lawmakers in the 73 House districts deemed “competitive” by the Cook Political Report took credit for $1.9 billion in earmarks, an average of $26 million each–about 14 percent higher than the average for non-appropriations committee members. Democrats in competitive races fared much better than their Republican counterparts, averaging $29.4 million to $23.4 million for Republicans.

The Washington Post’s take on the study is here, while the New York Times weighs in here, complete with links to congressional earmark request forms. TCS’ study won’t be the last word on 2008 earmarks, I suspect — just looking at the list of them, in a file aptly named bigkahuna.xls, raises all kinds of questions — but it’s definitely the can’t-do-without research tool for digging into them.

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Three watchdog groups have sent a letter to House appropriators urging more oversight of the oil and gas royalties owed to the federal government.  Friends of the Earth (FOE), Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) sent the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations a letter calling on the appropriators to set aside additional funding to hire auditors to oversee what they called the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) troubled oil and gas royalty programs.

DOI made two increases to the offshore royalty rates over the past year.  Those rate increases are ridiculous the groups say if effective auditing and enforcement functions are not in place to keep the oil companies honest, who over the past decade have been forced to pay almost $600 million in settlements for shortchanging the government in royalty payments.  Since 2000, DOI has cut the number of auditors by 45 or 15.7 percent (from 287 to 242). As the groups say in their letter, "With fewer watchdogs minding the store, oil and gas companies have fewer incentives to pay up."

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Some of grantees are stepping out…two of them have interesting pieces published within the past several days. The (Salida, Colo.) Mountain Mail ran a column today by Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, on the total disarray the budget process is in on Capitol Hill. In June, the paper published a very informative column Ryan wrote on mining reform, which the House passed last week.

Also last week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy published Gary Bass’ piece "Advocacy is not a Dirty Word". In the piece, Gary, founder and e.d. of OMB Watch, makes the case that non-profit organizations, as well as the foundations that fund them, should engage public policy as advocates. It?s a message he more fully outlines in his new book "Seen but Not Heard: Strengthening Nonprofit Advocacy".

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Yesterday, President Bush followed through on his threat to veto the Water Resources Development Act (H.R. 1495), a bill that would authorize $23 billion be spent on dam, levee and waterway projects throughout the country. Because the projects are so numerous and widespread, almost every member of Congress has a special project included, this veto might not stand.

A few weeks ago, The Politico listed all the various players have lined up pro and con on the bill and a veto. Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense say that the bill is ladened with earmarks making it fiscally irresponsible and applauded the president’s veto. Maybe so. But this bill gives me a chance to make a point about earmarking. Just because a project is ‘earmarked’ doesn’t mean it’s bad, or wasteful, or a payoff to a political contributor. We’ve seen lots of stories about such questionable earmarks in recent days, but it’s really, really important to remember that some earmarked funds really do go to critically important projects. Sunlight has been working with TCS on a new databases that will let you go through these earmarks easily and decide for yourself whether they are good, bad, or ugly.

We here at the Sunlight Foundation think that earmarking ought to be an open and transparent process: we don’t oppose the earmarking per se. It’s one way that Congress funds essential projects, in this case trusting the lawmakers who are close to their districts to decide what is necessary, rather than a nameless bureaucrat.

For instance, in the WRDA you’ll find critical projects for flood control and environmental restoration. The bill would also create a new national levee safety program that would help prepare for hurricanes. The work needed to protect Louisiana and the Gulf Coast from floods associated with hurricanes would be funded by this bill. No wonder the whole Louisiana delegation, regardless of party, is supporting the bill.

WRDA passed both chambers with veto-proof majorities, so it will be interesting to see if Congress will get its first override over the Bush Administration.

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Sunlight’s Real Time Investigations’ Project has done partial investigations into the connections between earmark recipients and their political contributions, but the Seattle Times has launched a database of 2007 defense earmarks for every member of Congress compared to the political contributions they received from the recipients of those earmarks. They also included how much was spent on lobbying by the recipients. (The campaign finance information only goes back six years. It’s unclear what period the lobbying money covers.) You can search by lawmaker’s name or by the name of a company or nonprofit that got the earmark. You can also browse lawmakers or earmark recipients by state. (Click on the corporate names for the information on how much was spent on lobbying.)

The reporters were able to tie only about half of the 2,700 earmarks in the 2007 defense spending bill to members of Congress. And they included only items Congress funded that the military did not ask for. Even so, they found some 45,000 matches.

These reporters really did it the hard way. It’s curious to me that they didn’t start with the work of Taxpayers for Common Sense and combine that with the lobbying and campaign finance databases of the Center for Responsive Politics.

Who got the most campaign contributions from donors at companies who got earmarks?

Who gave the most political money?

I wonder if anyone has looked solely at the contractors working in Iraq.

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