Well, the House Appropriations Committee filed the Military Construction spending bill. This is the first show of actually moving bills to the floor. We are hearing that the legislation will be considered before they split town for the August recess and the party conventions.

Filing the bill is also the trigger for releasing the earmark disclosure letters. And this year they have actually scanned them in and made them available electronically.

The committee actually deserves some credit here. The rule is that they just have to let us get a peek at them. The Armed Services Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee pursue this strategy, only allowing people who come by their office to get a glance. Whereas the Approps. committee gave us copies last year and this year they are posting them online.

We've gone ahead and put them on our site (5.3MB pdf) .  You can match them up with our Military Construction earmark database .