Dems Pushing Omnibus Spending Bill With $7.7 BILLION IN EARMARKS

The massive spenda-porkalous maximus bill, also known as the Democratic party stimulus bill did not do enough to feed the Democratic Parties hunger for spending. Yesterday the “omnibus” spending package was presented by House Democrats would combine nine annual appropriations bills left over from last year.  Democrats postponed work on last year's bill after they were unable to reach an agreement with President Bush on the amount of pork it contained.  The bill they unveiled now has over 8,500 earmarks which cost almost 7.7 BILLION dollars:

	Dollar Amount	Number
Ag-Rural Development-FDA	$353,105,900	504
Commerce, Justice & Science	$752,999,420	1540
Energy & Water	$3,534,626,863	1805
Financial Services	$135,276,814	244
Interior	$433,947,000	543
Labor-HHS-Education	$973,065,800	2154
Legislative Branch	$380,000	3
Transportation and Housing & Urban Development	$1,487,607,944	1777
Grand Totals	$7,671,009,741	8570

 Nancy Pelosi a master at spending YOUR money, called the new bill “the unfinished business of last year when the president refused to address the priorities and the needs of the American people.” In other words, "Tax and Spend, Ha, Ha we won, so we Tax and Spend"

More on the earmarks below:

$7.7 Billion In Earmarks In 2009 Omnibus Spending Bill
Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) has been going through the omnibus to pull together a total number of earmarks and dollar amount. TCS found 8,570 disclosed earmarks worth $7.7 billion. When you add the $6.6 billion in disclosed earmarks that were in the three FY09 spending bills that passed in the fall (Defense, DHS, MilCon/VA) you end up with $14.3 billion worth of disclosed earmarks in FY09. The apples-to-apples comparison from 2008 yielded $14.8 billion, so there was a $500 million reduction in disclosed earmarks between FY08 and FY09. Click here for the preliminary analysis.

A big disparity between TCS’s number and the Committee number ($3.8 billion) is that the Appropriations Committee chooses not to include earmarks from project-based accounts in their totals, despite the fact that they were not requested by the administration. For example, the Corps of Engineers budget is made up of hundreds of projects that add up to the agency total. These numbers are not included in the committee totals or in their reduction predictions. In addition, the committee ascribes many operations and maintenance projects to the President when they were not actually requested as part of the FY09 budget.

Finally, we can only provide numbers for disclosed earmarks. These are the projects with a member’s name next to them. However, TCS has been doing earmark analysis for many years and we found a lot of “looks like earmark, talks like an earmark” provisions in the bill that we tally as “undisclosed” earmarks, so our totals are apple-to-apple with previous years. For instance, last year TCS found billions ($3.5B) of undisclosed earmarks to go with the earmarks disclosed by the committees ($14.8B). This number will take a lot more digging to figure out. But we are on it.

Appropriations Resources

**TCS staff are reading through the omnibus bill to identify all earmarks (undisclosed as well as disclosed). We will post our earmark databases as they are completed.

AGRICULTURE
Bill Report (5MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (2.7MB)


COMMERCE/JUSTICE/SCIENCE
Bill Report (13.4MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (8.5MB)


DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS
Bill Report (19MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (3MB)

ENERGY AND WATER
Bill Report (19.2MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (9.8MB)

FINANCIAL SERVICES
Bill Report (4..4MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (1MB)

HOMELAND SECURITY
Bill Report (19MB) | Earmark Disclosure List

INTERIOR AND ENVIRONMENT
Bill Report (13.4MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (3MB)

LABOR/HHS/EDUCATION
Bill Report (31.5MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (13.5MB)

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH
Bill Report | Earmark Disclosure List

MILITARY CONSTRUCTION AND VETERANS AFFAIRS
Bill Report (19MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (1MB)

STATE AND FOREIGN OPERATIONS
Bill Report (2MB) | No Disclosed Earmarks

TRANSPORTATION/HOUSING & URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Bill Report (15.7MB) | Earmark Disclosure List (7MB)