As Earmarks Become Law, House Announces Earmark Reforms

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House Announces Earmark Reforms” title=”As Earmarks Become Law,
House Announces Earmark Reforms” />

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports:

Not to be outdone by President Obama, House Democratic leaders today unveiled their own package of reforms to the earmarking process, with a focus on transparency and accountability.

The reforms, timed to coincide with the president’s remarks on the subject, are being announced on the same day that a $410 billion spending bill — complete with some 8,500 earmarked special projects — becomes law.

The most sweeping elements: The Obama administration will have 20 days to review earmark requests, to “ensure that the earmark is eligible to receive funds and meets goals established in law.”

And it will be harder (though not impossible) to guide money to a particular favored interest: “For any earmark intended to be directed to a for-profit entity, the Executive Branch will be required to ensure that the earmark will be awarded through a competitive bidding process.”

(This may be hard to enforce, since earmarks are often narrowly written with geographical limitations. If you’re looking to expand research on fruit flies in Altoona, Pa., for example, there may not be too many companies that want the contract.)

House leaders also take a shot at controlling the number, and value, of earmarks: “Total funding for non-project based earmarks will be limited to 50% of the 2006 levels and no more than 1% of the total discretionary budget.”

The reforms don’t exactly match the president’s comments; Obama has committed himself to an even greater reduction in the number of earmarks.

Critics are quickly pointing out that if House Democrats were serious about reform, they could have started with the bill they just wrote. And this doesn’t go nearly as far as the proposal backed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others, to empower the president to pick individual pieces of pork out of spending bills.

But will House leaders get credit for taking a crack at reform — even if they’re a little late to this party?

Earmark Requests from Obama Transportation Secretary

ABC News? Rick Klein reports: Poring over the mammoth, $410 billion ?omnibus? spending bill released by the House Appropriations Committee this afternoon, an interesting name pops up as one of the more prolific earmarkers: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The earmark requests were submitted early last year, when LaHood, R-Ill., served as a member of the House Appropriations Committee — long before he could have been thinking about serving in President Obama?s Cabinet.

Members of that committee traditionally dominate the requests for funding for specific projects. Those requests are made public by the appropriations committee.

To choose just a few of LaHood?s voluminous earmark requests, which are scattered throughout the documentation posted online: Research funding for the Midwest Poultry Consortium; medical equipment funding for Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Ill.; construction funds for a cancer research lab at the University College of Medicine at Peoria; ?exhibit design? help for the Lakeview Museum in Peoria; planetarium equipment for the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences; ?public safety communications equipment? for the Logan County Sheriff?s Department; equipment for the Lincoln, Ill., Police Department; research funding for the ?National MarketMaker Network? at the University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign; ?crop production and food processing research? in Peoria; biodiesel and E85 storage tanks and dispensers for the City of Peoria; ?green building design and implementation? at Bradley University; and funding for the Soybean Disease Biotechnology Center and the Livestock Genome Sequencing Initiative in Champaign, Ill.

My colleague Jonathan Karl has a more complete look at some of the earmarks included in the House Appropriations Committee draft of the omnibus spending bill.