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Nancy Pelosi: Identify Earmarks
Rep. Nancy Pelosi says her first agenda item after becoming Speaker of the House will be a vote requiring lawmakers who sponsor "earmarks” to be identified.
Earmarks are provisions, inserted in larger bills, that allocate funds for specific projects. Many of these provisions are considered "pork,” but lawmakers are currently not required to identify themselves as the sponsor of an earmark.
"There has to be transparency,” the California Democrat told USA Today. "I’d just as soon do away with all [earmarks], but that probably isn’t realistic.”
The number of earmarks in appropriations bills has tripled in the past decade to about 16,000 in 2005.
House Republican leaders approved a sponsor disclosure rule in September, but no sponsors have yet been identified because the rule effectively exempted bills that dictate spending for 2007. That rule expires at the end of the year, so Democrats would have to pass a new disclosure requirement.
Story Continues Below Conservative groups have charged that anonymity in promoting earmarks fosters wasteful spending, and some have pointed to Republicans’ failure to deal with the problem as a reason behind the Democrats’ win in the midterm elections. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said earmark sponsor disclosure is one of several "needed reforms” that Republicans should support in the new Congress.
He told USA Today: "We hope that the party in which most of us have invested our trust will learn the right lessons” from the elections.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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