Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

Spending millions to end spending

Ironically, the super PAC named “Ending Spending Action Fund” may end up having the largest single donation to a super PAC. Records show Joe Ricketts, who built his fortune through Ameritrade, is trying to reduce spending by spending -- a lot.

House freshmen: New members find new earmarks?

Despite moratorium, Lungren staff met with firm seeking earmark

Six months after Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., joined a House Republican voluntary moratorium on requesting earmarks, his staff met with executives from a cyber security company that requested an earmark to explain their appropriations process, according to internal company emails from the firm released by a group of hackers known as Anonymous.

Senate discloses earmarks...poorly

Senate Appropriations chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, packed more than $130 million worth of defense earmarks into the $1.1. trillion Omnibus Act that the Senate released yesterday. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the committee's top Republican, larded the bill with more than $167 million defense earmarks. To find that out, one has to download the earmark table--in PDF--then convert the PDF to a tab delimited format, then plug them into a database (we've done so for Defense earmarks in a Socrata database below).

Researching Shelby's earmarks using Poligraft

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., requested earmarks for at least ten companies that have been donors to the lawmaker in this election cycle. Five of those companies have been long-term contributors to Shelby.

Disappearmarks: How highway projects get left behind

Pennsylvania's Ambridge-Aliquippa Bridge.

Disappearmarks: Billions set aside for earmarks remain unspent

Last week Rep. Betsy Markey, D-Colo., introduced a bill that would redirect some $700 million in funds that have been languishing in Transportation Department accounts, designated to fund projects earmarked by members of Congress more than a decade ago and long since forgotten.

Sunlight Labs weighs in on Earmark bill

In yesterday’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs meeting, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that portions of the bill were far too complex and were not able to be aggregated.

Levin and Coburn, toe to toe on Earmark Transparency Bill

A Senate committee’s planned markup of an Earmark Transparency Bill was postponed until July after the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs briefly debated the bill this afternoon.

Earmark Transparency Act reaches first Committee

The first Congressional discussion of the Earmark Transparency Act will take place today when the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs debates the bill at a business meeting at 2:30 p.m.

Reporter's Notebook: How we got the latest FTA disappearmark data

When we first reported about how we attempted to track down disappearmarks from the Federal Transit Administration, we recounted the difficulties in getting data in an electronic format. In response to our first Freedom of Information request, we were given a 121-page printout of a database, which in the end didn’t accurately include the information we sought: which SAFETEA-LU earmarks went unspent.

Disappearmarks: Millions in SAFETEA-LU transit earmarks are unspent

A sketch of what Rochester's Renaissance Square bus terminal would have looked like.

In House and Senate, appropriators got most contributions from earmark recipients

The Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense -- two of our favorite organizations -- have released their comprehensive earmark and influence database for fiscal year 2010 requests.

Disappearmarks: Buffalo’s Switcheroo saves earmark

Congressman Brian Higgins (right) breaks ground with Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown on historic streets in the Buffalo Inner Harbor in September 2009. (Photo: http://www.buffalowaterfront.com)