You can add Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman to the growing list of critics of Rep. David Obey’s plan to wait until the 11th hour to add earmarks to the 2008 spending bills. Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, announced the move after receiving over 36,000 earmark requests, saying that he and his staff needed the maximum amount of time to sort through them and weed out the bad ones. Critics of the plan, including Portman, argue that a better way to weed out bad earmarks is to subject them to public scrutiny at all stages of the legislative process.

“The House took a step in the right direction with the rule change [requiring the disclosure of earmark sponsors],” Portman says. “Now they’re taking a step in the wrong direction by saying that even though we have this rule saying all earmarks must be transparent, we must know who the recipients are, what the purpose is, and whether there’s a conflict of interest or not, now they’re saying well, even though we passed that rule, we’re going to wait, and we’re going to stuff earmarks into the bill at the last minute, when it’s in conference, after it’s gone through the House and the Senate debates. So you wouldn’t have a chance on the floor of the House to debate an earmark or potentially strike an earmark.

“So that’s a concern of ours, and for the media it ought to be a major concern, because you might not have the ability to analyze these earmarks,” Portman says. ”We will try to analyze them as quickly as we can, but as you know, with conference reports sometimes there’s a vote on the floor within a day or two. So we may only have 24 hours to look at these.”

Portman says that Obey has been more concerned about earmarks and their abuses than most members, and he commended Obey’s recent work to clean up the process, but added, “Let’s just be consistent and follow through on this.”