1. Washington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form

    By Bill Allison Jul 20, 2009 7:43 p.m.

    For the first time in 2009, members of Congress had to release their earmark requests to the public. As we've documented before, this information is scattered over 535 Web sites in all kinds of different formats. Jim Harper and Washington Watch have now released a tool that allows volunteers to capture that earmark information for posterity, centralize it in a single location, and allow for all kinds of additional analysis and investigation. And, if you participate, you can win a Kindle!

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  2. Open notebook: Following stimulus contracts

    By Luke Rosiak Jun 29, 2009 8:55 p.m. 1 comment

    Recovery.gov might not be useful yet for "following every penny" of stimulus spending, but with a telephone, Google, USASpending.gov and some luck it might not be that hard. Pretty much at random, I picked out a bunch of congressional press releases touting stimulus dollars going to local communities, and started making calls. Here's some notes on where one inquiry led me.

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  3. An Army of pharma trips?

    By Bill Allison Jun 10, 2009 3:56 p.m.

    The Center for Public Integrity has analyzed 22,000 Pentagon travel disclosures -- filed when an outside party pays for a trip taken by Department of Defense personnel. The finding that jumped out at both Anu and me:

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  4. Murtha's earmark recipients: How hands off (or on) is he?

    By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2009 4:17 p.m.

    Paul Singer reports in Roll Call on a tangled story that apparently involves the undisclosed hand of Rep. John Murtha but certainly involves his brother Kit (a retired lobbyist) and his former lobbying firm, five different companies doing business, directly or indirectly, with Defense (including one under federal indictment and one that allegedly wanted to outsource earmarked defense work to "China or someplace"), an earmark from the pre-disclosure era, some technical corrections added to the Tsunami relief bill that moved the funds for that earmark from one recipient to another (because the original recipient allegedly wanted to do the work in "China or someplace" rather than in Murtha's district), about $8.2 million of taxpayer money, and a whole lot of digging. Oh, and PMA Group makes a cameo appearance. Read the whole thing, but also consider this:

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  5. Delving into Rep. Lewis' earmark requests

    By Bill Allison May 26, 2009 9:27 p.m. 1 comment

    Ben Goad reports for the Press Enterprise that Rep. Jerry Lewis, former chair and now ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, earmarked $96 million for firms represented by Innovative Federal Strategies, which was once under federal investigation:

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  6. Links to Senate earmark disclosure requests in a database

    By Bill Allison May 20, 2009 3:13 p.m. 4 comments

    They labeled them as funding priorities, programs and project requests, investments in their states and, in just one case, earmarks. They posted image files that can't be cut and pasted, tables, single files with every item or dozens of files for each individual item. Still, 96 members of the Senate have, for the very first time, posted their earmark requests for appropriations bills online"and you can find all the links to those disclosures here.

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  7. You can't go far...

    By Bill Allison May 20, 2009 12:32 p.m.

    ...without running into Chinese dominance in some form of production and Goldman Sachs. It's after midnight, so I'm researching (what else) some earmarks. I came across a company, Molycorp Minerals, that might get $3 million from taxpayers to develop metal separation techniques in the U.S. so that we're not dependent on the Chinese for magnetic ores. The taxpayer money "will be leveraged against more than $20 million in private capital to accelerate the engineering and scale of this work."

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  8. Journal-Gazette finds Lugar earmark disclosures

    By Bill Allison May 18, 2009 10:09 p.m.

    Sylvia A. Smith, finds, to the best of my knowledge, the first online disclosure of earmark requests by a member of the Senate: Sen. Richard Lugar:

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  9. Whither stimulus contracts?

    By Bill Allison May 18, 2009 9:52 p.m. 8 comments

    The Washington Post's Kimberly Kindy reports that the Dept. of Energy is awarding stimulus funds to companies specializing in nuclear clean-ups that have a mixed track record:

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  10. Requirements matter: Just 83 members disclosed transportation earmark requests

    By Bill Allison May 15, 2009 6:48 p.m. 4 comments

    Apparently, deadlines do matter. Just 83 House members disclosed their earmark requests for the upcoming transportation reauthorization bill (that last version, SAFETEA-LU, was loaded with Prairie Parkway and Bridge to Nowhere--both of which were earmarks) on the same day that they submitted them to the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.

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  11. Where to find stimulus contracts

    By Bill Allison May 14, 2009 6:02 p.m. 7 comments

    A company that offers outsourcing services to federal and state governments got a a contract award for $2.8 million in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- the stimulus -- to set up call centers for the FCC's digital transition effort; they advertised for jobs paying $16.38 an hour in Buffalo, N.Y. The Dept. of Health and Human Services spent $326,000 in stimulus funds to purchase and install 98 workstations (and an option to store them until needed at a cost of $35 per pallet); a Midland, MI-based company, Space, Inc., got the sale. And the General Services Administration used stimulus funds to hire a pair of Northern Virginia contractors to help oversee the hiring of contractors bidding for both stimulus and non-stimulus work.

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  12. GM, Chrysler to cut 3,000 campaign contributors

    By Bill Allison May 13, 2009 10:47 p.m.

    ...er...dealers:

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

    By Bill Allison May 13, 2009 4:26 p.m. 1 comment

    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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  14. Cram down look ups, cont. cont....

    By Bill Allison May 13, 2009 3:32 p.m.

    For more detail on what this is, see here. While this is still partially that, it's also turning into something else. As I noted, this is raw research, not a finished product--results to come. One thing I'm finding is that looking closely at slices of data from Party Time leads in all kinds of directions...

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