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Committee on House Administration Supports Public's Right to Gov't Docs

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The influential Committee on House Administration released a letter yesterday that endorsed the principle that "the documents of our democracy should be available to all Americans electronically, in perpetuity, and for free." The letter, signed by every member of the committee, rejected a recommendation made in a flawed report issued by the National Academy of Public Administration, which had called for the Government Printing Office to consider charging "end uses" for online access to government documents made available through the online portal FDsys.

The Committee on House Administration oversees GPO, and the letter is a clear signal as to how GPO should proceed. The letter is also another example of the Committee's deepening emphasis on making the government transparent and accessible.

The NAPA report was requested by Congress as part of a long-range operational review of GPO. Unfortunately, despite dozens of interviews and a ten-month study, NAPA failed to contact key "end-users" who are responsible for republishing and widely disseminating public information, such as GovTrack.us, WashingtonWatch.com, the Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Effective Government, the Internet Archive, Public.Resource.Org, and the Legal Information Institute. These organizations are leaders in disseminating government-held information online to the public at no cost, and NAPA would have done well to learn from their expertise and see whether it could be applied to GPO.

Instead, NAPA's report misstated and omitted parts of the history regarding imposing fees on public access to electronic information. It omitted a discussion of how third parties, like the non-profits identified above, further GPO's mission to "produce, protect, preserve, and distribute documents of our democracy." It failed to examine how charging end users for electronic access would destroy the ability of non-profit organizations to obtain and re-transmit the information, thereby placing greater burdens on GPO to fill the gap and weakening public access to crucial information.

We applaud the Committee on House Administration's continued support for public access to governmental information. While it is unknown whether the letter has broader applicability to data being sold by GPO outside of FDsys, such as that listed here, it is important that information on FDsys remain available to the public at no cost, a position affirmed by the Committee.

Is the GPO a Digital Printer or a Digital Publisher?

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The tension between the Government Printing Office's traditional role as a printing operation and its future as a publisher of digital government information was apparent at a meeting of the House Appropriations Committee's Legislative Branch Subcommittee last week.

In her testimony, acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks stressed the GPO's efforts to transition to the digital age and acknowledged that the agency's role has evolved to that of a publishing operation. Unfortunately, the GPO has often failed to take steps that would allow it to fully embrace that role and ensure its future as an essential source of information.

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Why Are House Appropriators Not Webcasting Their Meetings?

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The House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee just scheduled four budget hearings for next week, none of which will be webcast (according to their public notices). Just like last year, the hearings will be held in a tiny room in the Capitol that is often crowded past capacity. The public has a right to attend these meetings, and House Rules require that they be webcast (whenever practicable).

So what does "practicable" mean? When we surveyed how frequently committees webcast their hearings last year, we found that House Appropriators stood out for the absence of transparency of their proceedings.

The Sunlight Foundation tracked 200 House hearings over 20 days to determine whether they were webcast live, plus 407 hearings from January 17 to April 2 to determine whether video from the proceedings were archived online. Twenty-five percent (48 of 200) of the hearings were not live-streamed, and 22 percent (91 of 407) were not archived on committee websites.
Of the 48 hearings that were not live-streamed, 47 were Appropriations Committee hearings (Armed Services was the other one). Similarly, of the 91 hearings that did not have video archived on the committee website, 74 were Appropriations Committee hearings.

This is an intensely frustrating and longstanding problem.

I'm singling out the Legislative Branch Appropriations Committee's budget hearings on GPO, LOC, GAO, and CBO because we at the Sunlight Foundation care a lot about the legislative support agencies, particularly as they empower a lot of federal transparency. (And they've been actively working on government transparency issues, and there's more that we'd like them to do.)

But it's unfair to single them out. A quick look at the upcoming hearings and meetings for the Appropriations Committee finds meeting after meeting that won't be webcast. The hearing on nuclear nonproliferation? Won't be webcast. Indian education? Nope. Army Corps of Engineers? Out of luck. Of the ten upcoming hearings that indicate webcasting status, 2 will be webcast and 8 (including a closed hearing) will not.

With the budget crisis, impending sequester, and questions about federal spending, how is it that the committee most responsible for spending money is the one that's least likely to put its meetings online? We've seen a commitment from the House leadership to do better, and I hope that the Appropriations Committee will find a way to make that happen.

GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP's Direction, But Much Work Remains

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The GPO's recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn't previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress's Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction.

Narrowing the Gap

In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the "Statutes at Large," which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year.

The Statutes at Large are literally an official source for federal laws and concurrent resolutions passed by Congress. The Statutes at Large are compilations of "slip laws," bills enacted by both chambers of Congress and signed by the President. By contrast, while many people look to the US Code to find the law, many sections of the Code in actuality are not the "official" law. A special office within the House of Representatives reorganizes the contents of the slip laws thematically into the 50 titles that make up the US Code, but unless that reorganized document (the US Code) is itself passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, it remains an incredibly helpful but ultimately unofficial source for US law. (Only half of the titles of the US Code have been enacted by Congress, and thus have become law themselves.) Moreover, if you want to see the intact text of the legislation as originally passed by Congress -- before it's broken up and scattered throughout the US Code -- the place to look is the Statutes at Large.

In 2011, GPO published 58 volumes of the Statutes at Large, covering 1951-2009, but did not break the volumes down into their constituent documents. Up until that point, the public laws were available as individual documents on THOMAS from 1989 to present as HTML (and PDF in some instances), and from 1789 to 1875 as TIFF (unwieldy image) files from the Library of Congress. Even with this recent release, 76 years of federal law are still unavailable online in any format from any official source; and the files released for the years 1789 to 1875 by the Library of Congress are difficult to use.

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House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data

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On January 30th, the House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012. (Sunlight and others made a presentation at a meeting, in October, on providing bulk access to legislative data.) This public meeting, organized by the Clerk's office, is a welcome manifestation of the consensus of political leaders of both parties in the House that now is the time to push Congress' legislative information sharing technology into the 21st century. In other words, it's time to open up Congress.

The meeting featured three presentations on ongoing initiatives, allowed for robust Q&A, and highlighted improvements expected to be rolled out of the next few months. In addition, the House recorded the presentations and has made the video available to the public. The ongoing initiatives are the release of bill text bulk data by GPO, the addition of committee information for docs.house.gov, and the release on floor summary bulk data. It's expected that these public meetings will continue at least as frequently as once per quarter, or more often when prompted by new releases of information.

As part of the introductory remarks, the House's Deputy Clerk explained that a report had been generated by the Task Force at the end of the 112th Congress on bulk access to legislative data and was submitted to the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee. It's likely that the report's recommendations will become public as part of the committee's hearings on the FY 2014 Appropriations Bill, at which time the public should have an opportunity to comment.

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Keeping GPO's Data Free

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The Government Printing Office's data portal, FDSys, is a major pillar of US government transparency and access to information. Information from all three branches of government is distributed freely and on tremendous scale, often in machine-readable form. They provide the official text of all bills in Congress. They provide the official source of data on all regulatory activity, the Federal Register. They are trying to grow into an official source for federal court opinions. They're adding new things all the time.

Anyone who gets their hands dirty with FDSys can come up with a list of recommendations for improvement, but their existence and overall output is hugely important and increasingly vital. They also set a strong precedent for how to balance the need for authentication with the need to make data easily consumable by third parties, by following the simple approach of providing digests that can be checked when needed.

The public needs the information in FDSys, and we need it to be free.

So you can forgive me for spitting out my drink upon reading that among the recommendations in the National Academy of Public Administration's audit of GPO was that GPO should start charging citizens for the right to download this information.

Given the unique role of FDsys in providing permanent public access to authentic government information, it is imperative for GPO to secure long-term, consistent funding for FDsys through cost recovery and/or appropriation to ensure current and future access to government information. ...

Rather than charge a publication price, GPO could explore charging a small user fee to recoup the cost of providing access to government information on FDsys, or allowing users to view documents for free, and charging for document downloads.

NAPA cites the failed attempt to charge for an earlier GPO Access program, but says "the problem" was payment processing fees, and mentions public outcry as an afterthought:

When GPO Access was launched, GPO charged users for access to digital content. The problem was that the administrative costs of collecting payments were higher than what GPO could charge. Also, there was resistance from public interest groups and other stakeholders.

NAPA goes on to make a very poor argument that because people don't mind paying to enter national parks anymore, they won't mind suddenly having to pay to download government information. This is an argument they are advancing in 2013.

Still, this report is worth taking seriously. The report was requested by Congress, it covers a wide range of issues, and GPO has already held it up as a validation of their mission.

What's clear is that on the specific issue of whether it's acceptable to charge for access to fundamental government information, the answer that's obvious to citizens and advocates on the outside — No! — is much murkier among the various pieces of the US government.

The concern NAPA expresses is that the information in FDSys is too important to be tied to the whims of Congressional appropriators. This is definitely a concern; James Jacobs has already written eloquently about the repeated historical attempts to defund or privatize the distribution of the information GPO is reponsible for. NAPA describes user fees as a way to guarantee that this information will stay available.

However, the solution can't be to ask citizens to pay access fees. There's no such thing as a nominal fee for government information this fundamental. Public services like GovTrack.us, OpenCongress, Scout, and even other government initiatives like FederalRegister.gov, can only exist by first obtaining entire datasets — millions of pages — from FDSys. Imposing access fees for FDSys seriously reduces transparency, crushes innovation and experimentation, and hampers research and analysis.

Instead, the data in FDSys must come to be viewed by everyone — from NAPA to Congress — for what it is: part of the lifeblood of information in the United States. It must remain free.

Access to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come

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Earlier today, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor and the Government Printing Office announced an improvement in how legislation is made publicly available. Starting in the 113th Congress, GPO will make all bills available for bulk download in XML format. While this doesn't change much from a technological perspective, it does mark a significant change from a policy perspective.

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The Missing Data Behind The Plum Book

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The latest compilation of more than 8,000 federal jobs known as the Plum Book is out, and for the first time it is available in print, digital, and mobile format. There's still something missing, though, with this list that holds interest for the public and Washington, DC, power brokers: the data behind it.

Every four years, the Government Printing Office (GPO) compiles this publication of positions that "may be subject to noncompetitive appointment," as GPO puts it. The book is important because of the information it provides about who is chosen to fill presidential-appointed and other positions. In short, it is the best, most authoritative list of senior positions throughout the executive branch. It originated in the 1950's during the Eisenhower administration, when the Republican Party requested a list of positions the president could fill, according to GPO. The Plum Book has come out every four years just after the presidential election since 1960.

Anyone viewing the book (whatever the format) can look up positions by agency, position title, appointment type, pay, term expiration, and more. It is an incredibly rich source of information that has many possible uses.

There are still barriers to accessing that information, however. The book is available on the GPO website in text and as a PDF, neither of which is an open format that would make sorting or reusing the underlying data a simple task.

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Keeping Authentication Simple

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The point of publishing bulk data is so it can be reused as widely as possible. This is particularly true for government data, which belongs to the public.

Government agencies can sometimes also be concerned with ensuring the authenticity of their legal information - especially when the data might be seen as an official source. It breaks down into two major concerns: integrity (ensuring the text is accurate), and origin (proving it's official). A lot of people are used to the "wax seal" model of authenticity - the experience of opening a PDF and seeing that the document is signed and official. This model quickly breaks down for distributing bulk data.

The goals of ease of reuse and authentication are frequently presented as being in tension, but that tension is just as frequently overstated. There are straightforward approaches to guaranteeing authenticity of bulk data that do not encumber reuse.

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Congress launches THOMAS successor Congress.gov

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Seventeen years after the creation of THOMAS, Congress today launched a sleeker, more intuitive and user-friendly legislative information website, beta.congress.gov.

What's noticeable about this evolving beta website, besides the major improvements in how people can search and understand legislative developments, is what's still missing: public comment on the design process and computer-friendly bulk access to the underlying data.

We hope that Congress will now deeply engage with the public on the design and specifications process and make sure that legislative information is available in ways that most encourage analysis and reuse.

It's also worth remembering what the Library of Congress said in 1996 as it considered what should be included in its legislative information system:

To be most useful to Members of Congress, the legislative information system must provide access to a wide range of current and historical information, including existing statutes, support agency analyses, academic studies, court decisions, budget and financial data, regulations and executive branch policies, public and private sector analyses, lobby group position papers, and newspaper reports from local, national, and international sources.

We will have more to say as we dig deeper into the website. The Library of Congress' news release is below.

LOC News Announcement on Beta.Congress.gov

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