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House to Hear Measure on Tracking Money

By Jim Abrams

The Associated Press

September 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - Curious about how much of your money is going to encourage hydroponic tomato production in Ohio _ or to build bridges to nowhere in Alaska? A user-friendly Web site is going to help you find out.

The House on Wednesday was taking up a measure to create a Google-like search engine that will help interested citizens, as well as advocacy groups, track some $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, special projects and loans.

Congress is expected to give final approval to the legislation this week, sending it to President Bush for his signature. The Office of Management and Budget is to create the database, with a Jan. 1, 2008, target for opening it to the public.

"This bill will make tracking government spending easier for citizens, reporters and legislators alike," the Senate sponsors, Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., said in a statement. "Improving transparency will force lawmakers to be more accountable to the American people."

Passage would allow lawmakers to claim some success in making government more open. The House is also expected to vote on a rules change this week to bring more openness to "earmarks," or special projects. But a main legislative objective this year, lobbying reform in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, has languished.

The database will join numerous others that provide detailed information on public and political spending. But the sponsors said it would be accessible to the average citizen as well as the taxpayer watchdog groups.

Users will be able to type in "Halliburton" or "Planned Parenthood" to find out what kind of contracts or grants over $25,000 have been awarded such companies or groups. They can also do a search for a specific state or district to see what kind of money is flowing from Washington.

They could check on earmarks in a highway bill last year such as the $200 million approved for a bridge in a sparsely populated area of Alaska or the defense contracts that proved the undoing of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. The California Republican was sentenced to eight years in prison earlier this year for taking bribes in exchange for steering contracts to a company.

In 2009 the Web site is scheduled to add a feature to help pinpoint subcontracts, an area that tends to be less visible to the public and is thus more susceptible to waste and abuse.

An original House bill allowed searches only of grants, which often go to nonprofits, but the Senate version extended that to contracts awarded to businesses.

The Senate bill passed last week only after bloggers, from both the right and the left, launched a vigorous campaign to expose senators who had secretly put up parliamentary barriers to action on the measure.

"Pork and waste issues are one thing that the right and left of the blogosphere have been able to find common ground on," said Judd Legum, editor of the blog Think Progress and research director of the progressive group Center for American Progress.

"Especially as a blog we believe that transparency can improve government and that a lot of this stuff (waste and abuse) only happens because people don't know about it," he said.