Four and half months into the fiscal year, 2007 appropriations are finally done. What a mess. The Republicans left a mess by not getting their work done by September 30, 2006. The Democrats made a mess by coming up with a Frankenstein’s-monster bill and denying any amendments to an enormous spending measure. A mess. There’s no other way to describe this process. Congress is sending a hybrid continuing resolution – omnibus to the President’s desk. At 137 pages, it’s not a true CR – that would be about six pages. But considering it costs $463.5 billion, covers nine spending bills and all federal departments except defense and Homeland Security, it’s not an omnibus – that would be about 1,000 pages.

A lot has been made of the question: Are there earmarks or not? First, to be clear on a few things:

There do not appear to be any new earmarks in the CR. At least not that we have found yet. The President’s Statement of Administration Policy is telling on this point – the Administration “continues to analyze the bill to determine whether earmarks are included.” Yeah, we’re still looking too.

Next, FY07 is not an earmark-free year. TCS has databased more than 2,600 earmarks in the FY07 Defense spending bill (we will be coming out with that database shortly, I’ll let you know). So, there’s till plenty of mischief to be had and digging to be done.

Finally, there’s a lot of debate about Sec. 112 of the FY07 spending bill, which states: “Any language specifying an earmark in a committee report or statement of managers accompanying an appropriations Act for fiscal year 2006 shall have no legal effect with respect to funds appropriated by this division.” That section doesn’t accomplish anything concrete. Report language already didn’t have the force of law. But – and this is a glass-half-full interpretation – it does reveal that the Appropriators didn’t think FY06 earmarks continued to live beyond last years spending bills. Now, you could argue that by not explicitly eliminating the earmarks, you are continuing them. Gosh, I hope not. The alternative is to explicitly state that no FY06 earmarks can receive funding in the FY07 spending bill. But, I don’t see how you could completely eliminate the earmarks like that. Take the Corps of Engineers for example. In FY06, the Corps budget included 2040 earmarks worth $4.8 billion. The entire agency budget was just over $5B so if you explicitly denied funding any of the FY06 earmarks, you would have an agency with nearly $5B burning a hole in its pocket with nothing to spend it on.

So, where does this leave taxpayers who are concerned that earmarking will just go on behind closed doors in the form of lobbyists and members of Congress dialing agencies for dollars on their pet projects? In the hands of the administration. Congress has said, in a plain-language reading of Sec. 112, that they don’t want FY06 earmarks. In their SAP, the administration has said they “will work with heads of executive departments and agencies to ensure earmarks in Appropriations Committee reports for FY06 are treated in a manner consistent with Sec. 112.” That means to me that the White House has (or will be) directing agency heads to ignore those pesky earmarks – or not, we’ll be watching. One good indicator was that the DOE Chief of staff sent around a internal memo, instructing agency staff that just because you are getting calls from Capitol Hill doesn’t mean that FY06 earmarks are going to get funded.

So the responsibility for ensuring that the more than 2,600 earmarks in the defense spending bill are the high-water mark for FY07 rests squarely with the President and the Executive Branch. Strong leadership from the White House on down will stop wasteful spending in its tracks. Coupled with recent commitments by both the President and House Appropriations Chair Obey to halve the level of earmarks in FY08, we may have turned a corner. But this is Washington, DC – so we’ll be watching closely.