The New York Times reported that Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, has decided to change how each congressmember’s pet pork barrel projects, known as earmarks, get reviewed. He’s decided that the 36,000 earmarks will be posted in the Congressional Record one month before they’ll be voted on for final approval. That’s 36,000 individual spending requests valued at over $64 billion on top of the normal budget. This will give the public an opportunity to raise questions and potentially force earmark sponsors to defend their projects to someone other than their enabling buddies in the House. Rep. Obey’s also indicated “that a crush of work gave the committee staff insufficient time to evaluate the thousands of requests for projects earlier.”

Want to help evaluate the requests?

Porkbusters is offering to help the committee out. They are running a letter template you can email to Rep. Obey offering to help him and his committee to review the earmarks in our spare time. Think of it as distributed budget evaluation support. While I’m sure some of the earmarks are valid and worthy of the expense, many others are nothing more than a way to payback large contributors by getting them the government project they’d like. These earmarks are the coin of the realm in Congress. You think the Congress wrote up 36,000 individual earmarks? Lobbyists and special interest groups write them up so their favorite representative can slip them into a much larger spending bill at a later time.

While I wouldn’t honestly expect anything to come from signing up, at a minimum it’s a show of support for a higher degree of financial accountability in an organization that currently shows close to none.