As any local gym owner can attest, their businesses are packed in early January with folks resolved to work off some of the holiday turkey and pie. By February, however, the gyms clear out and only the most dedicated gym rats remain.

Armed with their own new year’s resolutions about earmarks and ethics reforms, House Democrats made it their first order of business to usher in new rules (pdf) regarding transparency. These efforts were supposed to ensure that the general public knows the Congressional sponsor of earmarks in federal legislation. The Senate also acted quickly, adopting a sweeping and bipartisan ethics and transparency bill (S.1), (pdf) which incorporated and even slightly improved upon the House language.

As a result of the House reforms, we now see sponsors names next to their projects in the “technical corrections” bill (.xls, .2MB) for the bloated transportation bill from last Congress. What an ironic twist that the first bill to list earmark sponsors is an amendment of the bill that brought us the granddaddy of all earmarks, the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska.

There are problems with the execution of these new rules, though. For one, sponsors names aren’t disclosed until the committee report is filed, which usually happens only a day or so before a bill is voted on. That’s several days late and a dollar short in our book. Better would be to see the sponsors’ names when the bill is introduced and at each step of the process or, at a minimum, at least three days before a vote.

And the definition of what constitutes an earmark appears to have a massive loophole, which we found during debate last month over the emergency war spending bill. The bill was declared “earmark free” by the committee. Yet Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) pointed out what is clearly an earmark: $35 million for risk mitigation projects at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. It met all the criteria for an earmark, but Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) stood on the floor and explained that it can’t be an earmark because no member requested it; he put it into the bill himself. Either there has been a loose and incorrect interpretation of the House earmarking rules, or this is the first known example of an “immaculate conception” earmark.

Though the rules in the House have changed regarding earmark transparency, the Senate’s rules have not. For its part, the Senate passed legislation to reform earmarking and ethics, (S. 1) and sent it to the House, but leadership there hasn’t even assigned the bill to a committee yet. And despite rumblings for more than a month there has been no indication when or if it will be brought to the floor.

But the congressional clock is ticking. Appropriations season is right around the corner. Big omnibus project authorization bills are heading to the floor.

The Senate didn’t change its rules, so Senators don’t think that they need to do anything about earmark transparency until the President signs a bill. The House did change its rules, and doesn’t seem to think passing legislation on the matter is a top priority. The result? In a recent letter to their fellow Senators, Chairman and Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee solicited new earmarked projects for their already $15 billion Corps of Engineers (pdf) water projects bill. In that letter, they indicated their intent to comply with tougher earmark disclosure rules if they are signed into law, but not before.

If lawmakers were fully committed to reform, they could simply start following the spirit behind the reform legislation. But Congressional commitment to transparency and earmark reform seems to be wavering, so it’s unclear what the public can expect.

Now is not the time to backslide on those new year’s resolutions. If the new Congress wants to show they are fiscally and ethically fit, they need to kick the congressional couch potatoes in the backside and getting moving on putting some more muscle behind earmark transparency.

For more information, contact Steve Ellis at (202)-546-8500 ext. 126 or steve [at] taxpayer.net