We have completed compiling all the WRDA earmarks – all 438 of them – and their sponsors into a database. The Water Resources Development Act is the first Senate bill to disclose all of the earmark sponsors. Well almost all, we found at least one that was an earmark but not on their list (Section 5001, Kincaid Lake in Illinois) it’s magenta in the listing. The color coding is as follows: Blue – changed between EPW and floor; Yellow – added in manager’s amendment for floor; Green – deleted between EPW and floor. I would recommend using the total cost of $14.9B, because there are many provisions where the federal share was not clear or described, so to be more conservative, we did not included them in the federal share column. They are voting on amendments now, but considering Sen. Reid threw a couple of wrenches in the works (amendments dealing with Iraq) final consideration won’t be until tomorrow, or even later.

Like many first steps, the Committee stumbled with transparency. The replacement bill, which was more than 80 pages longer than the committee version, wasn’t available until minutes before the first vote to move to the bill. They also didn’t fare too well at following the earmark transparency changes the Senate voted for unanimously. The earmark disclosure list went up on the Committee web site after consideration began rather than 48 hours before consideration. Shortly after it was posted, the listing was taken back down and corrected and put back up hours later.

The Senate doesn’t make it easy to track funding in the bill and the federal share of costs. In many cases they play hide the ball by referring to previous passed legislation or simply not recording the cost. For that reason, I recommend you use the total cost of the bill – $14.9B by our estimate. That number does not include the very expensive policy changes in the bill or some of the authorizations in Louisiana that have no cost estimates among other provisions. There is a lot of parochial buried treasure this bill that taxpayers won’t find out about until months or years later.

This bill has it all – $2 billion for well documented boondoggle on the Upper Mississippi River and more than $200 million for port project in Iberia, LA that the Corps claims will only return $1.03 for every dollar invested – leaving absolutely no margin for error and sucker bet if there ever was one. There are beach projects for California and New Jersey, and between the Committee and the floor the Committee found room for more than a $1.6 billion in new projects including more than 120 of the environmental slush fund projects. The second tab of the database has the state by state listing, again, I recommend using the total cost.

The White House has complained about the overspending and wasteful policy provisions in both the House and the Senate bills, now it is time for them to get off the sidelines and work to cut this bill down to size.

 

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