Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) has cross-referenced earmarks sought and obtained by Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee members with Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign contribution data. The 18 Senators on the Subcommittee pulled down a whopping 60% of the $2.7 billion worth of earmarks in their version of the FY10 spending bill. At the start of the bill writing process, subcommittee members requested $12.5B worth of earmarks for 496 companies and universities (this excludes funding provided to federal entities) who had given them $1.57 million in campaign contributions. Some of the companies contributed to the lawmakers, and some of them did not, but when the dust settled it was clear which group did better.

Out of the requests, 270 companies ended up receiving $1.36 billion from the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee members. Within that group 123 gave contributions to Subcommittee members worth $1.25 million, receiving $762.3 million worth of earmarks. In the end, 68% of the companies who contributed struck gold, and only 46% of those who didn’t contribute got earmarks. Even more tellingly, while contributor companies only represented 25% of the total requests, they got 56% of the earmark dollars.

This effort mirrored TCS’s database of House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee members, available here .

To create this tool, TCS started with the requests that each member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee was required to submit at the beginning of this appropriations process. From there, we searched the FEC and OpenSecrets data to uncover every contribution made by employees of an intended recipient company to the Senator requesting the earmark and every contribution made by the Political Action Committee (PAC) of an intended recipient company since 2007. We looked at contributions to both the members’ campaign committees and their leadership PAC’s. To complete the tool, we added the funding amount that was included in the Senate’s version of the defense bill.

See the results of this project:

• Earmarks Requested and Received by Senate Defense Approprations Subcommittee Members, with Recipient Donation Information (Excel File)
• Summary of Donations Received From Earmark Requesting Companies, since 2007 (Excel File)

TCS Sources for this Project:

• Federal Election Commission (FEC.gov)
   
• Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org)
   
• Senate Earmark Request Disclosures (Senate Committee on Appropriations)