Proposed earmarks in Congress will be exposed to a large dose of sunshine before they are enacted into law, says a top Democrat in the House of Representatives.

The earmarks will be published in the Congressional Record at least a month before the spending bills in which they appear come up for final approval, said Rep. David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who leads the House Appropriations Committee. That will allow anyone to examine and object to particular projects, The New York Times reported today.

Mr. Obey described the plan after House Republicans criticized him for an earmarks policy he announced earlier this year. Under that approach, Congressional leaders would have added earmarks — which are noncompetitive awards secured by Congress members for favored constituents, including many colleges — to spending bills for 2008 late in the legislative process. Mr. Obey said that the delay would give his staff members the time to properly vet the more than 30,000 requests for earmarks that his committee has received.

But Republicans said that such an approach would reduce the transparency of earmarks, especially for wasteful projects, and that the projects should be unveiled in the initial versions of appropriations bills, which Democratic leaders began drawing up this month. Under Mr. Obey’s plan, the earmarks would be disclosed only after those bills had been approved by the Appropriations Committee and the full House.

Republicans have portrayed Mr. Obey’s initial policy and the revised one as showing a lack of commitment to fiscal discipline and accountability. But the complaints carry more than a whiff of hypocrisy because earmarks more than tripled during the 12 years that Republicans controlled Congress. And leaders of both parties “air dropped,” as the practice is called, a sizable number of earmarks into spending bills late in the legislative process, after they had been approved by both chambers of Congress. —Jeffrey Brainard