Washington, D.C. ? Even though President Barack Obama has repeatedly pledged to ban congressional earmarks, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has 16 such projects, worth about $8.5 million, in the bill the Senate is scheduled to begin debating today.

The earmarks include funds for a Chicago planetarium and a Chicago suburb. Obama has been relentless in criticizing the use of earmarks; in his address to a joint session of Congress last week, he boasted how the economic stimulus package was “free of earmarks.”

By the end of this week, however, he’s likely to sign a separate $410 billion spending plan that keeps most domestic programs funded through Sept. 30, the end of this fiscal year. It’s a plan that contains about 9,000 earmarks.

Emanuel, who until Jan. 2 was a congressman from Chicago, dismissed the bill Sunday as “last year’s business.” Most of the measure was written in 2008. It stalled when the Democratic-led Congress and former President George W. Bush disagreed on spending levels.

Emanuel’s name remains on the bill, and senior adviser Sarah Feinberg explained, “He has no control over it.” When asked why Emanuel, like other former members of Congress, still has his name on earmarks, House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Kirstin Brost, said, “Why not?”

Among the projects with Emanuel’s name attached are $900,000 for equipment at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum; $95,000 for “educational expenses” at the Kohl Children’s Museum in Glenview, Ill.; and $950,000 for “street rehabilitation” in the village of Franklin Park, Ill.

Feinberg explained the projects should not be viewed as Emanuel’s earmarks, but “funding that belongs to the people of the Fifth District of Illinois.” He represented the district for six years.