This week, many lawmakers sent their constituents on a virtual earmark Easter egg hunt. For the first time, members were required to list each of their earmark requests on their official website. Unfortunately, many members created a labyrinth that made finding their list of requests difficult or impossible, proving again a lesson learned long ago—simply posting information on the web is not transparency. The information has to be readily accessible, easy to understand, and available in a format that is downloadable and easy to manage.

Back in January, spending committee Chairmen David Obey (D-WI) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) laid out new rules for earmark requests. Lawmakers were required to post all of their requests on their websites, including information about the purpose, amount and locations of the requests. We had been advocating for this big transparency step forward for years and applauded the decision. From our perspective, when spending requests are submitted to the committee, lawmakers are signing on the dotted line that they think this is a wise and important use of federal dollars. At that point, the public has a right to know how their lawmakers are proposing to spend their tax dollars.

Unfortunately, we also predicted the disclosure mess that the new rules have now created. Instead of establishing a centralized repository of information, each lawmaker decided where and how to post the information (click here to see what level of disclosure we found for your Representative). And as predicted, it has been all over the map. Some lawmakers, like Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. Emerson (R-MO), posted a link to the requests right on their front page. Others, like Rep. Sarbanes (D-MD) and Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), created a puzzle of sorts for their constituents – the link to the requests is listed under “Issues” or “Constituent Requests” or some other euphemistically named category like “Grant Announcements.”

Once you have actually found the list of requests, there is no guarantee that it can be easily understood. Some have posted a simple, easy to read summary list; others provide a confusing mountain of links, verbiage and pdf documents. Some, like Reps. Kingston (R-GA) and Driehaus (D-OH) posted everything that had been requested of them, without indicating what they actually forwarded to the Committee –denying their constituents insight into their decision-making.

This isn’t the first attempt at transparency that has been bogged down. Most notable is the stimulus spending tracking site, www.recovery.gov, that we wrote about a few weeks ago. Or the fact that many executive branch budget documents are scattered across the federal agencies, buried on web sites that require an advanced degree in electronic archeology to dig out.

To be truly transparent, information has to be readily available in a format this is understandable, usable, and downloadable. Anything less is akin to hiding the ball.

But despite the problems with this round of disclosure, this is still an unprecedented step. And there is plenty of time to improve the process if the will to be truly transparent is there. We recognize that transparency can be hard work, but the easily predictable mistakes – like posting information on hundreds of individual member websites – need to be avoided moving forward.

Over the last two years, we saw an improvement in the disclosure of earmarks that actually get into the spending bills. At each step the House Appropriations Committee has made the information more readily available electronically, searchable, and decipherable. There is still a ways to go, to be sure. Heck, we think Congress should put us out of the earmark database business, but progress has been made. Now the Committee needs to turn its focus toward ensuring that all taxpayers are provided with true transparency when it comes to their Representative's spending requests.