Finally! It’s been two years since the last spending bills were considered in (semi) regular order. It wasn’t procedurally perfect—three bills jammed together nearly two months after the start of fiscal year 2012—but hey, you have to start somewhere.

That means there are nine more spending bills to go. So Congress needs to pick up the pace. Most of the year was dithered away by Congress as they jockeyed for position on the debt ceiling increase and the great budgetary spectacle that is the Super Committee (aka Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction). Tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, next week we’ll know whether they pulled a rabbit out of a hat or laid a turkey on the American taxpayer.

Believe it or not, the Super Committee is largely irrelevant to the deliberations on this fiscal year’s spending bills. These twelve bills will fund the government for FY12, which will probably be over by the time any deficit reduction prescribed by the Super Committee takes effect. They are on separate tracks.

Even if the Super Committee flops big next week, the minibus package of bills Congress passed yesterday already extended temporary funding for the rest of government until December 16.

So instead of letting a post-Thanksgiving tryptophan stupor set in, lawmakers need to scramble and get the Defense, Health & Human Services, Veterans, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, and the rest of government’s spending in place.

A closer look at the three bills—Agriculture, Commerce-Justice-Science, and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development—that were passed yesterday is instructive. Overall budget levels were slightly down compared to fiscal year 2011 and cut even more compared to fiscal year 2010. Another interesting difference between those three bills in FY10 and in FY12: in FY10 those bills contained 3,569 in disclosed lawmaker earmarks worth $2.3 billion. In FY12….

The facts belie the old canard that cutting earmarks wouldn’t save any money. For example, the “special research grants” at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture received $105.2 million in FY10, which included 169 earmarks worth $88 million. In the FY12 bill, “special research grants” received $4 million. Guess they were only “special” when lawmakers could direct the funding to their pet projects.

But that’s not the end of the story. We always realized that “eliminating” earmarks would be like squeezing a balloon. Congressional interest in pursuing funding for parochial projects will simply be squeezed into other forms. Rather than earmark, in some cases lawmakers will instead pick up the phone to call agencies to argue for funding for their interests: phonemarking. In other cases they send letters: lettermarking.

While we certainly recognize every lawmakers constitutional right to petition their government, there is no guarantee of privacy–each and every one of the letters are subject to the Freedom of Information Act and can be obtained by the public. A memo from the first days of the administration said anything that could be FOIA’ed should be pre-emptively disclosed. In addition, a Bush era Executive Order directs agencies to disclose these lettermarks and not give them any deference in decision-making. A recent draft memo from the Obama administration also directs disclosure. So what’s the hold up?!

Disclosure of lettermarks is absolutely the right thing to do. We have called for this since the earmark moratorium was established. The purpose of the moratorium was to bring spending decisions into the light. End runs like lettermarking and phonemarking are disappointing but predictable responses. We have to keep up the pressure to get to point where the American public can review clear and transparent metrics and criteria that lead to spending decisions based on merit, competition, or formulas. It isn’t all about Congressional decision-making either. To further increase budgetary transparency, lawmakers should embrace lettermarking transparency and turn around and demand the Executive branch to open up what is too often black box budgeting and let the public see how spending decisions are made.

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TCS Quote of the Week

“In the last week, each side has busted through a wall. Democrats are talking about entitlement reform, curbing the increase in spending on mandatory programs like Medicare. Republicans have broken through the wall on tax revenue increases. Now they have to figure out if they can meet each other somewhere in the middle.” — Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut (The New York Times)