The President today signed the 2009 Defense Authorization bill. While the levels of earmarks are down significantly from previous years, the legislation still contained over 600 earmarks worth $5 billion. 

The bill was the product of informal negotiations by leaders from the House and Senate armed services committees trying to speedily wrap the bill up before Congress left for the election recess. The legislation included tables of the original House and Senate earmarks as addendums, but the final earmark totals were listed separately in the bill’s funding table. The haste with which the tables were composed, however, means names of earmarks often differed significantly between funding and disclosure tables (see our complete database ). 

The funding table identifies 603 earmarks worth just under $5 billion, where the House version of the bill contained 539 earmarks worth nearly $10 billion and the Senate 435 worth $5.2 billion. Historically, the conference version of spending and authorization bills generally add the requests together, and the large number of earmarks with both House and Senate sponsors bring the total down. The 2009 bill lists only 23 shared earmarks, however, meaning hundreds of projects were eliminated. Most of these appear to be small items such as military construction projects, but some big-ticket items also fell by the wayside, such as a $2 billion earmark for the C-17 Globemaster sponsored by several members of the House.

Major earmarks that made the cut include $523 million for the F-22A Raptor, $496 million for two LPD-17 ships and $300 million for a Virginia Class submarine. The table notably disclosed a $247.5 million earmark for a Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine, a program the Senate failed to disclose as an earmark last year.

Staffers told us these “conferees” decided to trim any earmarks they didn’t think would find funding in the appropriations bills, meaning we’re very likely to see these projects in the future.