Obama calls for earmark overhaul but will sign omnibus

President Obama called for fundamental earmark reform Wednesday even as he prepared to sign a fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill packed with thousands of earmarks the White House did not want.

The president was expected to sign that $410 billion spending bill Wednesday, away from cameras and questions.

Obama offered a mild defense of the bill during brief remarks Wednesday morning and rejected Republican calls that he issue his first veto.

"I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government, and we have a lot more work to do. We can't have Congress bogged down at this critical juncture in our economic recovery," he said.

But Obama made it clear that this bill is an exception as he laid out principles for reforming the process. Those principles call for more transparency, public acknowledgment of earmarks on the Web sites of lawmakers who request them and public hearings. "These principles begin with a simple concept -- earmarks must have a legitimate and worthy public purpose," Obama said.

But he also acknowledged that lawmakers have a right to seek funds for "worthy projects that benefit people in their districts." If future legislation includes money for a project that does not have a public purpose, he said, "we will seek to eliminate it, and we will work with Congress to do so." Such earmarks, he said, "have been used as a vehicle for waste and fraud and abuse."

Obama's comments came as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders announced two new initiatives on earmark transparency. One would give the appropriate executive-branch agency 20 days to review a member-requested project to ensure the earmark is eligible to receive funds and meets the goals established in law. The other would require the executive branch to ensure that any earmark for a for-profit entity be awarded through competitive bidding.

These two initiatives are part of a raft of earmark-related reforms House Democrats issued earlier in the year. "With the inclusion of these new reforms, we will ensure accountability for congressional earmarks at every step of the process," Pelosi said in a statement.

The omnibus bill funds most government operations through the rest of fiscal 2009. It includes about 8,600 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group. The House Appropriations Committee minority staff puts the number at about 8,000 earmarks, with a price tag of $5.5 billion.

Obama said Congress could avoid many problems with spending-related bills by considering spending bills on time and sending them to him "without delay or obstruction, so that we don't face another massive, last-minute omnibus bill like this one."