When I heard last week from Hill sources that the White House congressional liason staff was pressuring OMB Director Rob Portman to not release all of the earmarks requested by Members of Congress to executive agencies under the FY2005 budget, I called the OMB press office.
When I asked for a copy of the earmark database and copies of all correspondence between OMB and executive branch officials and Members and Hill staff, I was promised a call-back from a senior OMB spokesman. Not surprisingly, that call never came.
Now this morning, word is circulating on the Hill that the Bush administration is going to release only a limited database of earmarks later today or maybe no database at all, but just aggregate or summary data.
Seems the White House legislative staff fears releasing the database would offend members of the appropriation committees in Congress. So, the public gets the shaft, again, on a topic on which there is no doubt where the American people stand.
People want earmarks ended and Bush promised in his State of the Union address to join the campaign to abolish the key to what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, calls the “gateway drug on federal spending addiction.”
Note that this earmark suppression comes during Sunshine Week. It’s not clear if President Bush is aware of what his legislative staff appears to be doing, but if he is and is ok with it, why should anybody ever again believe a word he says on earmarks or controlling federal spending?
And note the impeccable timing of the White House legislative staff – they are squeezing OMB during Sunshine Week.
Brilliant!
UPDATE: OMB Won’t Disclose Names of Members Who Asked for Earmarks
There was an expectation on the Hill and the Blogosphere that OMB would connect names of congressmen with specific earmarks when it posted its earmarks database today, but it has become clear that Members of Congress need not worry about that possibility, except coincidentally.
After much discussion, OMB’s Sean Kevelighan put it this way when asked directly if OMBwould post the names of any individual congressmen who requested specific earmarks:
“There may be some instances where it would be very clear such as in a state with one congressman but our intent with this database is not to pinpoint particular earmarks to particular congressmen.”
Otherwise, OMB will not include the names. In fact, according to Kevelighan, “oftentimes it isn’t possible to link a name to an earmark or that information is simply unobtainable.”
So, let’s review. Here’s the schedule OMB said in its Jan. 25 memo to heads of departments and agencies it would follow leading up to its posting on the Internet of a database of Fiscal Year 2005 earmarks:
• January-February – Agencies collect relevant data.
• Early February – OMB distributes final guidance on developing the baseline data and makes the data application available for updating.
• February 28 – Agencies complete data entry.
• March 7 – OMB completes review of data.
• March 12 – OMB posts information to the public Internet.
The purpose of the database was to enable White House policymakers to identify and catalogue all earmarks, including those in specific bills and those appearing in reports on bills, according to the memo.
Clearly, the OMB memo doesn’t promise to name names.
So why did so many of us assume names would be named by OMB?
Could it be because the fundamental problem with earmarks is their anonymity, which puts them beyond official accountability?
Or because abasic purpose of earmark reform legislation working through Congress from both sides of the aisle was to force public disclosure of the names of individual congressmen requesting particular earmarks?
Or because it is impossible without the name of the requesting congressman to determine if a specific earmark benefits a campaign donor, family member or business associate?
True, nowhere in the Jan. 25 OMB memo does it say OMB would include in the database the names of the specific Members of Congress requesting a particular earmark.
So it is understandable why OMB officials were evidently a little miffed earlier today when this post first went up this morning claiming the Whte House has caved on posting the earmarks, as promised in the Jan. 25 memo.
Kevelighan also emphatically denied that there was any pressure on OMB from the White House congressional liason office to not release the names of individual Members requesting specific earmarks. That’s entirely logical, given the assumption that OMB never intended to release the names in the first place, as evidenced by the Jan. 25 memo.
But even given all of the above why wouldn’t OMB release those names? Because all OMB seeks is a baseline from which can be obtained an “accurate estimation of the cost of earmarks,” according to Kevelighan.
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