The Earmarkdata.org effort may be seeing success very soon. As WashingtonWatch.com reports, new bills introduced in the Senate and House would require Congress to report on spending earmarks in usable formats like we’re pushing for on this site!

This is great news, and real progress for our earmark transparency effort!

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is one of those great defenders of earmarks—and that’s fine. The Oklahoman reports that his earmark requests add up to more than $615 million, two-thirds for defense contractors and military bases.

You can review them—one by one by one—starting on this page from his Web site. We’d much prefer having the data in a useable form.

Adding in Representative Dan Boren’s (D-OK) requests, the total of potential earmarks for Oklahoma reach over $1 billion. Here are Boren’s earmark requests, also not in easily useable form.

Senator Tom Coburn and the rest of the Oklahoma delegation have sworn off earmarking.

Think earmarks are going away with the decision by House Republicans to forgo them this year? Don’t be too sure.

According to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the earmark ban was “symbolic about our commitment to reducing spending over time.” He didn’t say that House Republican earmarks would come back for sure next year, but that conclusion is easy to draw from the Politico report on his comments.

You want to earmark, Mr. Lewis? Just give us the earmark data!

Politico reports that Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) has decided not to request earmarks this year.

The web page where he previously listed his earmark requests for fiscal year 2011 now has a press release that says:

“I realize I am one junior senator in the minority, but given our country’s fiscal condition, I could not in good conscience keep my name next to any earmark requests this year,” said Corker. “It is not necessarily the overall cost of federal earmarks, which represents a very small portion of the overall budget, that poses a problem; it’s the process, which is fundamentally flawed and lacks oversight.”

Well, we were planning on doing some oversight! But we’re fine not having to oversee Corker’s earmark requests.

As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee  is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same.

So you can go line-by-line and figure out what requests your member of Congress has put in. But what’s the total number of your members’ requests? What’s the total amount of his or her requests? Who requested the most earmarks, in dollars or in number? Where in your district is the money supposed to go? HTML pages and PDF documents are very hard to work with and don’t allow us to answer these questions.

Without the data in the right formats it’s really hard to figure all this stuff out. All we want here at Earmarkdata.org is for Congress to produce information about what it’s doing in formats we can use.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition. And please tell a friend about this effort.

We’ve gotten some good press and blog coverage since we rolled out Earmarkdata.org. Here are a few highlights:

Open Government Expert Launches Earmarkdata.org in the Washington Examiner

Group Wants Earmark Data in Easy-to-Read Format on Federal News Radio

Federal Gov’t Mostly Ignoring Obama Directive To Be More Transparent on TechDirt

Tracking Earmarks on NewsChannel8’s (Washington, D.C.) Federal News Tonight

We’re pleased by the support we’ve seen so far. If you haven’t already signed the petition, do it now! And send this along to friends and colleagues who share your interest in transparent government!

Earmarks represent the worst of Washington, D.C. to many people. Washington acts as a “favor factory” when campaign contributions and lobbying pitches go in and taxpayers’ cash comes out.

Well, we’re doing something about it. And you can help.

There’s no reason why it should take investigative journalism to find out what our representatives are doing. We’re asking Congress to give us data about their earmark requests and the earmarks that make it into the annual spending bills. Just give us the earmark data!

Here on Earmarkdata.org, we’re asking you to ask Congress for earmark transparency.

The home page describes some of what was been happening with earmarks, including President Obama’s call for earmark transparency in his State of the Union speech.

On the “Take Action” page, you can sign a petition and communicate your desire for earmark transparency directly to Congress and the White House. (Do it Now!)

And the next thing you should do is tell a friend. (Clicking will open an email for you to send.)

We are also working with database experts to develop and perfect the data model that we want Congress to use, so we can get the most out of the information we get. If you’re a developer, you’ll want to study the data schema we’re producing and monitor its development on our Google group.

(The latest news shows some moves in Congress to do away with earmarks entirely. We’ll report on that here on the Earmarkdata.org blog, of course.)

What could be simpler, Congress: Just Give Us the Earmark Data!

Sign the petition or tell a friend now!