Today was to be the day of earmark reckoning. At 3 PM, the Office of Management and Budget was supposed to post on the internet a database of all the FY05 earmarks and supplemental information about the earmarks, including: recipient, cost, description, whether it was an ongoing or first-time project, discretionary or mandatory, legislated or in report language. In short, this was going to be the day when some sunlight was shined on the seamy underbelly of appropriations. Instead, it is expected that all taxpayers are going to get is some generic data on total number and cost of FY05 earmarks – hardly something to write home about. This is very disappointing and yet another example of the Administration overpromising and under-delivering on its promises of fiscal responsibility.

If this is all we are going to get, then why wait until 3 PM. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense’s database there were a total of 15,584 earmarks worth $32.7B in the FY05 appropriations bills. Using different criteria, the Congressional Research Service found 15,899 earmarks worth $48.1B in the FY05 appropriations bills.

According to the OMB memo, the Administration’s FY05 earmark totals should also include authorization bills (in addition to appropriation bills). In that case, the TCS’s database of the 2005 transportation bill’s (SAFETEA-LU) found 6,373 earmarks worth $24.2B that should also be included.

Both the House and the Senate recently voted for increasing earmark transparency, so providing the public information about how their tax dollars were spent more than a year ago shouldn’t be so troubling. Earmarking has corroded the federal spending process, and the Administration being cowed into pulling the plug on their earmark transparency database is just latest example of the breakdown. Simply put, elected officials are ashamed to see their projects in lights. Congress needs to enact the earmark transparency provisions in S.1 now. All earmark request information should be made public on the internet. And the Administration needs to release the earmark information that they have been obtaining from federal agencies. A tremendous amount of federal resources must have been expended to collect this data over the last two months and now at the 12th hour the project has been spiked. So it appears taxpayer money has been wasted collecting information about projects that, in some cases, wasted taxpayers money.