From the WSJ Opinion Journal:

Nothing highlighted Congress’s spending problem in last year’s election more than earmarks, the special projects like Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members drop into last-minute conference reports leaving no opportunity to debate or amend them. Voters opted for change in Congress, but on earmarks it looks as if they’ll only be getting more smoke and mirrors.

Democrats promised reform and instituted “a moratorium” on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (CRS)–a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency–has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. “They claim it’ll be transparent, but they’re taking away the very data that lets us know what’s really happening,” says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. “I’m convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS.”

…

“There is real anxiety members will complain if CRS says something is an earmark when the new appropriations committees say it isn’t,” says another CRS staffer. He notes CRS “caught hell” last year with its report finding that more than 95% of all earmarks in fiscal year 2006 bills weren’t written into law and thus not legally binding.

The concern now is that free-spending appropriations committees will use the new CRS gag rule to define earmarks downward. “We need CRS to continue its reliable reporting so we can save the taxpayers money,” says Sen. DeMint. Earmarks aren’t chump change. CRS calculated they amounted to $64 billion in 2006, and in the past they’ve often been given out as “sweeteners” to convince members to vote for mega-ticket bills.

The real kicker is that this publicly funded federal agency will not give out their reports - they claim it would “compromise the confidentiality of its contacts with Congress” - but they’ll sell them for $4,000!  I didn’t know confidentiality was a function of price.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Pork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.