Sunlight Foundation

Senate discloses earmarks...poorly

By Bill Allison Dec 14 2010 6:13 p.m.

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).

In January's State of the Union address, President Obama called for Congress to release its earmarks in a single website that would tell citizens not only, as the chart below does, that Sen. Daniel Inouye requested $3.2 million for Flash Hyper-Dimensional Imaging System for Space Situational Awareness and Ballistic Missile Defense, but also that the company receiving the earmark is Hnu Photonics and that it's not the first earmark the project has gotten.  

Congress has yet to act on that request. Here are the Defense earmarks, in a searchable, sortable downloadable format.

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