A proposal floated by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Bill Young (R-FL) this year has the potential to result in the biggest, lardiest, most disgustingly overstuffed omnibus appropriations bill in Congressional history. The proposal one-ups all previous attempts at government gimmickry and if Young's congressional colleagues acquiesce, American taxpayers can all but kiss budget transparency goodbye.

With Majority Leader Tom Delay's (R-TX) seal of approval, Chairman Young has suggested that Congress completely abandon the process of debating and voting on 13 individual spending bills and just stuff the entire federal budget into a single piece of legislation. The resulting amalgamation will be given a couple of good whacks with the amendment tenderizing hammer, and the whole mess will be sent straight to the president.

Allocating hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars is a duty that should be performed with thorough deliberation and diligent attention to the needs of our nation and the constraints of our budget. Historically, Congress has only consolidated spending bills into one piece of legislation as a last resort, when there is no longer time to give individual consideration to each bill. To begin the whole process with an omnibus is like breaking the glass and triggering an alarm when there's not even a sign of smoke.

Taxpayers have reason to fret over a large omnibus: larger bills have less oversight and transparency. Omnibus bills are the ideal vessel for lawmakers to bring home the bacon. The most recent omnibus weighed in at $328 billion and contained a record-breaking 7,931 earmarks that cost taxpayers more than $10 billion. And that bill counted for only 7 of the13 annual appropriations bills.

Omnibus bills haven't always been standard procedure for Congress, but in the past five years there have been four omnibuses, with the biggest being the fiscal year 2003 bill, which combined 11 of the 13 appropriations bills. Others have been a little more modest: the most recent one combines seven bills; fiscal year 2001, three; and four in fiscal 2000. Only in 2001, with appropriations for fiscal year 2002 on their plate, did Congress manage to pass every single appropriations bill individually.

What we are seeing is an effort to disguise poor fiscal policy with bigger and better gimmicks. Dressing a pig in lambs' clothing is one of the best ways to evade public scrutiny. Nothing could prevent transparency more than ramming an omnibus bill longer than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica through Congress.

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