So 1,759 earmarks and $3.8 billion later we finished our database of the Senate Energy & Water Appropriations bill. It’s a doozy. Twenty percent of the funding in the bill is earmarked and virtually all of the “water” side of the bill is earmarks. The biggest contributor to the earmark total was that the Senate took $2.1B in Corps of Engineers Operation and Maintenance funding which the administration divvied up into 21 regions and turned it into $2.2 billion worth earmarks for hundreds of projects.

When you have more than 1,500 earmarks to play with, you can send them to a lot of things, like $750,000 for the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. Or for a couple new Corps labs in Vicksburg, MS. Sen. Bond was able to get $4 million for his Missouri boot heel boondoggle, St. John’s bayou and New Madrid Floodway. One problem – the Corps’ economic justification got laughed out of court, so he added a legislative provision (earmark) to the bill stipulating the project be “economically justified.” Why? Because Congress said so, numbers are for the little people.

The Energy portion is littered with “Congressionally directed projects.” For for everything from $500,000 for marine systems research at University of Massachusetts Boston (Kennedy/Kerry), to $2 million molecular genetics research at the Neurosciences Institute in Morgantown, WV (Byrd) to a $1 million for large Scale Application of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes at the University of Oklahoma (Inhofe).