Grade the Earmarks

Following up on Scott P’s interesting thinking on earmarks (yes I know), here is an interesting approach to the earmark question — Congressman Tim Walz (MN-1) has asked his constituents to vote and comment on the earmark applications submitted to his office. You can see them all (plus the feedback form) here. And if you click over to look, as you review the list of earmark requests (99 requests?? Yikes!), you have the opportunity to review the documents on each request. Each is available in a zip file to download so you can bring yourself up to speed on each request.

No matter what you think of earmarks, this is certainly a fairly unique way of choosing what to submit to the Appropriations Committee. And it certainly takes advantage of the fact that people think that it is everyone else’s earmarks that are the problem and lets them get involved with choosing and advocating.

He’s clear about the process (submitting an earmark to Appropriations is no guarantee of funding) and clear about his evaluation criteria: 1) Transparency and Accountability, 2) Job Creation or Transformative Impact and 3) Public Support for the effort proposed. And he commits to posting up his requests for earmarks up on his website.

What I like about this is the collaborative spirit — asking his constituents to help weigh in AND posting the applications up on line. It looks to me that even posting the entire application up on line seems new (but I didn’t look at all of their webpages, either) and a very welcome bit of disclosure and transparency. This is one idea I wish our Congressional delegation would steal.