The nation's largest taxpayer group says both political parties in Washington are engaged in a "conspiracy of silence" over what they're actually doing to the Omnibus budget bill. Meantime, the spending spree is continuing in Washington.
Senate Democrats were forced to stall action on a massive $410 billion Omnibus spending bill for the 2009 fiscal year, which began in October. The bill was blocked by critics who said it contained too much wasteful government spending, notably more than 8,500 earmarks. There have been attempts to allow the government to get originally planned increases in spending rather than boosting it even more through the Omnibus bill, but all of those efforts have been defeated. Pete Sepp, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), says the delay of the Omnibus was an embarrassment for congressional Democrats and the president. "President Obama campaigned on a platform of stamping out earmarks and not tolerating them if legislation containing earmarks were [sic] sent to him for his signature," notes Sepp. "Unfortunately it looks like he's going to sign the bill anyway -- and so we already have a broken pledge to taxpayers, both from Congress and the White House." Sepp notes earmarking has been a bipartisan problem for a number of years, and the explosion in earmarks began under Republican control of Congress and the White House. The NTU spokesman says both parties are being dishonest when they say they are getting earmarks under control. "And it is evidenced by all of these earmarks in the Omnibus bill -- everything from rodeo museums to honeybee factories to the Guam public library," Sepp exclaims. "It seems really strange that members of Congress think they can simply make up their own version of the truth and expect the American people to swallow it whole. They're not." More than 100 federal programs are receiving funding boosts both in the recently enacted "stimulus" package and the soon-to-be-enacted Omnibus bill.
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