Watch:

Earmarks - they’re how members of Congress and senators steer federal funds to special interests and projects in their districts. It’s often called “pork barrel” spending because the money is divided up based on seniority and insider deals rather than the general welfare of the country.

For years now, earmarking has been conducted behind the scenes, but the House and Senate recently required their membership to reveal earmark requests. The door to the smoke-filled room has been unlocked, and now we’re going to kick it down!

The problem is that earmark information is spread out across congressional Web sites, and it’s in many different formats. The solution? We’ve created a system for compiling earmark data in one place-actually, for you to compile it.

We want you to add earmarks to our database through our earmark entry form. Pick your hometown member of Congress or Senator, your favorite representative-or your least favorite-and put their earmarks in the database.

Related Posts:

• Washington Watch — Thad Cochran (R-MS): Appropriators Gone Wild
• WCBS — NYC’s First Non-Smoking Apt Building Set To Open
• Why Tiahrt-Moran doesn’t matter to many conservatives
• This is evidently not a joke: China forces citizens to smoke cigarettes
• Wash Post — Reid’s at the Reins in Health-Care Battle

Tags: pork barrel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 11:03 pm and is filed under National. 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.