The playground taunt “That’s for me to know and you to find out” seems to have become an operating principle on earmarks for the Senate these days.

Right before they split town to enjoy a week-long Memorial Day break, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) passed the $650 billion 2008 Defense Authorization bill, which not only directs the activities for the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2008 but also includes hundreds of earmarked projects. At least that’s what we assume, since they haven’t made the bill available yet. Last year’s Defense authorization bill and report totaled 1,446 pages, and all we have so far is a 28-page release (pdf) describing among other things how this bill “… increased the transparency of Member’s earmarks.”

This isn’t exactly true.

We looked at every committee member’s website and found that eleven Senators from both parties have issued press releases to the hometown crowd crowing about the defense earmark booty they’d plundered.  The earmarks they bragged about include: $42 million for Advanced Hypersonic Weapons constructed in Huntsville, AL courtesy of Sen. Sessions (R-AL); to $11.8 million for a ground water treatment plant at Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada for Sens. Ensign (R-NV) and Reid (D-NV); to $5 million for Microelectronics Advanced Research’s Semiconductor Focus Center Research Program in NY obtained by Sen. Clinton (D-NY).

Instead of true earmark transparency, Senators are cherry-picking their hometown earmarks to brag about to their constituents. The rest of the public is left in the dark until the committee gets around to releasing the bill and the hundreds of heretofore undisclosed earmarks.  Sure, what the committee described as their earmark policy sounds fine, but it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if they don’t practice what they are preaching.

It’s not like the requirement to disclose earmarks should have surprised anyone. The Senate voted unanimously in January to disclose earmark requests and their sponsors. Sen. Levin (D-MI), the Chairman of Armed Services, wrote in an April 24th letter that he intended to disclose earmarks. But the Committee has passed its bill, yet the only earmark disclosure we find is in targeted press releases.

The nation’s taxpayers fund the Department of Defense, and so everyone deserves to know where the money is going. If Senators can issue a press release about what they were able to grab for special interests, the Committee should also be able to tell us where our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being spent.