Free Republic

<p>The site allows anyone to search for grant and contract spending by company, city, agency or industry. "We were frustrated by how hard it was to find out about government spending," said Gary Bass, the group's executive director. "We were being told we couldn't do this - it would cost millions of dollars." After Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need to hold government contractors accountable, OMB Watch received a three-year grant from the Sunlight Foundation http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/ and launched the site six months later.</p>

An explosion in the use of earmarks, Congress members' way of funding pet projects without public scrutiny, is fueling new efforts to track the practice amid fears of rising corruption. The number of earmarks surged nearly fourfold over the past decade to 15,877 last year, according to the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. (snip) "A lot of these earmarks are bought and sold like bales of cotton," said Ron Utt, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation (snip) The increase in earmarks is connected to an increase in the number of lobbyists offering to obtain...