President Bush issued a statement saying the bill would make sure that ``lawmakers and the public are better informed before Congress votes to spend the taxpayers' money."
Democrats disparaged the measure, citing the failure of the Republican-led Congress to pass more comprehensive legislation to clean up lawmaker relations with lobbyists.
The rules change ``will do little more than to get Republicans through the November elections," said Representative Louise Slaughter of New York, top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.
Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and a leading critic of special-interest spending, said: ``I'm under no illusion that this legislation, which deals only with the issue of transparency, will solve the problem of earmarking. But this bill does represent an important first step."
Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group, said there were 9,963 such projects in the spending bills for the 2006 budget year, costing $29 billion.
The House voted 245-171 on the rule change a day after Congress sent to President Bush a bill intended to make government spending more open to public scrutiny. Under that bill, the government will set up by 2008 a Google-like search engine so people can track hundreds of billions of dollars in grants and contracts that the government awards every year.
But there is currently no prospect for progress on more comprehensive lobbying and ethics overhaul. That had been highlighted as an urgent task at the beginning of the year after several lawmakers were tied to illegal or unsavory actions, particularly with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Last spring the House and Senate passed bills that would have required lobbyists to be more open about their activities; put limits on gifts and meals from lobbyists and travel involving lobbyists; slowed the movement of lawmakers leaving office for lobbying jobs; provided ethics training to staff members; and ended anonymous earmarks.
