Summary
In the 1994 elections, Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 42 years. When the newly installed GOP Congress passed its spending bills for fiscal 1996, which began Oct. 1, 1995, the defense appropriations bill included 270 earmarks totaling $2.8 billion, according to a tally by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently cited by USA Today. Ten years later, for fiscal 2006, the GOP-controlled Congress approved a defense appropriations bill containing 2,847 earmarks totaling $9.4 billion, according to CRS figures. Thus, during a decade of virtually uninterrupted GOP congressional dominance, the number of defense earmarks increased by nearly 1,000 percent and their monetary value soared by nearly 250 percent.
After former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty last December to accepting bribes from defense contractors in exchange for directing millions of dollars in business their way, Republican congressional leaders promised wholesale reform of the earmark process, whereby lawmakers steer taxpayer funds to specific projects or contractors. Altogether, the CRS study calculated that spending earmarks totaled $67 billion for the current fiscal year, reflecting a $15 billion increase over fiscal 2005.See the full content of this document
Extract
Bare-Bones Earmark Reforms
Last week, by a 245-171 vote, the House passed a bare-minimum, loophole-laden rule that begins to address spending...
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