During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush said that the “the people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks.”

Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. I also asked you to stop slipping earmarks into committee reports that never even come to a vote. Unfortunately, neither goal was met. So this time, if you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I will send it back to you with my veto. And tomorrow, I will issue an Executive Order that directs Federal agencies to ignore any future earmark that is not voted on by the Congress. If these items are truly worth funding, the Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote.

In fact, under Democratic control, earmarks “are down more than 40 percent from the last budget passed by Republicans .” President Bush’s executive order, however, “won’t apply to the thousands of earmarks that accompanied a massive spending bill he signed last month,” leaving in place “11,735 earmarks — totaling $16.9 billion under White House estimates — that were contained in the just-completed 2008 spending bills.”

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