December 19, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

The largest spending bill in U.S. history

Big spenders in Congress unveiled the largest spending bill in American history late Sunday night.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) speaks to bloggers at Heritage Tuesday about the omnibus spending bill, in the foreground.

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Congressional appropriators combined all the spending bills Congress has failed to pass into a single, 3,417-page monstrosity that contains more than 11,000 earmarks. And, of course, they expected to pass this omnibus bill—with little or no scrutiny—in the few short days before they leave town for Christmas. It did pass the Senate on Tuesday night, and House approval is expected Wednesday.

But it didn’t pass without scrutiny, as the big spenders had hoped. Heritage Foundation experts were up early and worked all day Monday and Tuesday to highlight the flaws in the legislation.

» Tour the pork projects on your Christmas vacation.

Heritage experts looked at the bill’s language to produce research papers on the bill’s misguided policies. In the past few days, they prepared a number of key analyses.

• Brian Riedl tabulated all the wasteful pork-barrel spending.

• James Carafano argued that “the bill includes language that would add layers of unnecessary security regulations concerning the nation's critical infrastructure.”

• Distinguished Fellow Ernest Istook compiled a list of the accounting tricks and other manipulations to watch out for.

• Nick Loris pointed out that the bill prohibits oil shale development—blocking access to key domestic energy resources.

• Baker Spring noted that the bill eliminates funding for upgrading the nation’s nuclear arsenal to meet current and future threats.

Heritage also launched Omnibusting.com, a clearing-house website to draw attention to the bill’s defects in plain English. For example,

• New language would make it more difficult to build a border fence by adding layers of bureaucracy—while also gutting the Secure Fence Act.

• Funding is boosted for the NEA, foreign aid, the AFL-CIO and Congressional office space—and slashed for military modernization, nuclear weapons upgrades, and adoption funding.

• The bill includes more than 300 secretly-added pork-barrel projects; and

• Bad policy changes are packed into the legislation, affecting areas like English in the workplace, Cuba sanctions, North Korea and abstinence education.

In addition, our government relations team secured a copy of the bill and posted a searchable version of the full text on Heritage.org. While some of the bill had been posted to a Congressional web site, large chunks were excluded with lame justifications. The site became a go-to location for those seeking to research the legislation themselves.

All this work got into the right hands. In fact, an e-mail circulated by Congressional conservatives listing the top ten flaws with the omnibus bill cited Heritage’s research five times, including the number one spot. And leading Capitol Hill news outlets, including National Journal and The Hill, cited Heritage’s efforts to expose the waste.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.