Tracking wild pork: Stevens spending snafu.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Senator Ted Stevens constructed out of federal funds - Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act - Brief article

LAST APRIL two senators, Republican Revolution holdout Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Democratic wunderkind Barack Obama (D-Ill.), introduced the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. The bill creates a publicly accessible database of congressional spending on about $1 trillion worth of earmarks, grants, contracts, and loans. It's pork on parade, conveniently indexed and made available with a "Google-like search engine."

Things were chugging along fine, with a nice list of co-sponsors including Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), when someone put a "secret hold" on the bill, stopping it dead. The secret hold, also known as a procedural hold, is a senatorial courtesy members can use to anonymously stall a bill they'd rather not see come to the floor.

It took a coalition of intrepid citizen-journalists to discover the source of the hold-up, but the culprit, smoked out by bloggers, surprised no one: Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican most famous for his...