There is a new website that allows taxpayers to easily find out who is throwing their money away via earmarks. Earmarks like this:
It took three clicks to turn up four lawmakers behind the hand-protection earmark yesterday: Democratic Reps. Brian Baird, Norm Dicks and Jim McDermott and Republican Rep. Dave Reichert, all of Washington state. They helped a Seattle-based company called Outdoor Research win a contract for the system, otherwise known as “gloves.”
That’s great. taxpayer dollars to a private company to study “gloves.” That’s in the Constitution? I don’t think so.
Anyway, the website is called EarmarkWatch.org, and it is a great tool for the activist citizen:
Created by two prominent watchdog groups, the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense, the earmark site “walks people through the steps involved in who’s behind an earmark and why, and it calls the public into the actual project research,” said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense.
As someone who spends weeks each year searching federal spending bills for pork, Ellis hopes that eventually the new tool “will help millions of Americans to research what Congress should already be telling them: How their dollars are being spent.”
I also linked up Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation. They both created this site and are advocates of responsible spending in Washington.
