1. Earmark request disclosures: do deadlines make a difference?

    By Bill Allison May 13, 2009 4:26 p.m.

    Adam Hughes of OMB Watch asks a trenchant question in response to a report by Jackie Kucinich in Roll Call. Kucinich notes that Rep. James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation Committee, which will be overseeing the massive transportation reauthorization bill (the last one, as Taxpayers for Common Sense's Steve Ellis tells Roll Call, contained earmarks for the bridges to nowhere), will have less stringent earmark disclosure rules than the House Appropriations Committee. The latter, chaired by Rep. David Obey, requires members post their earmark requests online before they submit them to the committee. Oberstar, by contrast "set a May 14 deadline for Members to submit requests and encouraged them to post the requests on their Web sites, but he stopped short of setting a mandatory deadline," according to Roll Call. The committee's communications director, Jim Bernard, told Roll Call "We are not giving them a hard deadline [or stipulating] we won't consider them until they are posted. Our style is bit different than Mr. Obey's, but our results will be the same." Hughes asks: Sorry - quick follow-up Mr. Bernard. How exactly is not requiring earmark requests to be disclosed under the transportation reauthorization the same as requiring earmark requests to be disclosed in appropriations bills?

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  2. TCS releases searchable earmark lists

    By Bill Allison Sep 24, 2008 6:27 p.m.

    While most of Washington fixates on the $700 billion bailout package now being debated by the House Finance and Senate Banking Committees (Rep. Frank has added his own version of a bailout to the ones proposed by the administration and Sen. Christopher Dodd), our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense are paying attention to some $600 billion in spending that Rep. David Obey, D-Ohio, concocted in secret, or, as he put it to Bloomberg News, operating "the old fashioned way by brokering agreements in order to get things done and I make no apology for it." Taxpayers has posted searchable lists of all the earmarks in the bill.

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