In the last 18 months, the House of Representatives has made significant strides towards greater openness and transparency in congressional deliberations, but significant work remains. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for 2013, which was marked-up by a subcommittee last week, presents a major vehicle for the House leadership to make good on its promise to implement common-sense transparency measures this session.

While there are many issues that can be addressed a number of different ways, Sunlight will be looking at  the full committee markup to see if the bill:

-- Provides bulk access to THOMAS data
-- Fully funds the Office of Congressional Ethics
-- Requires Publication of  CRS Reports online
-- Publishes the Constitution Annotated online as it's updated in XML
-- Reinstates the Office of Technology Assessment
-- Makes reports to Congress available online
-- Publishes House spending information in an appropriate format for the data

Improve Public Access to THOMAS Data

THOMAS was created by Congress to make legislative information freely available to the public, but the Library of Congress has not kept up with best practices. One such practice -- "bulk access" -- would ease the development of new tools and technologies by publishing THOMAS data files online, promoting accurate and timely information dissemination. Congress has expressed its support for bulk data as have many organizations, but the Library continues to stall despite a 2008 memo describing how easy it would be to implement.

At the recent legislative subcommittee hearing, Rep. Honda mentioned that text has been inserted into the committee's report that would in some way address the bulk data question. The last time this happened, the language was watered down sufficiently so that the Library of Congress successfully evaded its obligations over the last half a decade. We hope the bill will contain these two provisions:

(1) Congress directs the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS within 120 days of passage (2) Congress directs the Library of Congress to immediately create an advisory committee on improving public access to legislative information that is composed of people inside and outside of government.

Fully Fund the Office of Congressional Ethics

The Office of Congressional Ethics is the House of Representatives' independent ethics watchdog. It came into existence in March 2008 after a series of corruption scandals prompted congressional leaders to explore creating a transparent, outside enforcement entity. While OCE is not as robust as originally contemplated, it plays a crucial role in ethics oversight. Last year, the office survived a counterproductive effort by nearly 100 members of Congress to significantly reduce its funding. This year's appropriations bill maintains OCE's funding at $1,548,000, which is the same level as last year. We believe that OCE should be strengthened, but at a minimum, its funding should be sustained at least at this level.

Publish CRS Reports Online

Congressional Research Service reports undergird the public's understanding of Congress, but CRS no longer directly releases the reports to the public. As a consequence, while many reports used by citizens, courts, and government employees are on the internet, they are often out-of-date, and a fair number are available only for a fee or not at all. By comparison, sister agencies like CBO and GAO regularly publish reports online. For more than a decade, organizations and members of Congress have urged that CRS reports be publicly available, and CRS concerns have been refuted by a former counsel to the House of Representatives. The reports are already digitized and available on Congress's intranet; it would take a trivial effort to publish them online.

During the markup of the 2012 Appropriations Bill, Rep. Leonard Lance introduced an amendment that would have required the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate to maintain a website containing CRS Reports and Appropriation products while protecting confidential advice from CRS. Similar legislation has been introduced by Rep. Quigley. We hope that House Appropriators will move to make these reports more readily available to the public.

Release the Constitution Annotated Online

The Constitution Annotated (or CONAN) is a continuously-updated 100-year-old legal treatise that explains the Constitution as it has been interpreted by Supreme Court. Maintained by CRS and printed by GPO, a hard copy is published (and put online) only once a decade, with printed updates every two years. However, CONAN is updated frequently, with those updates available on Congress' internal website. In November 2010 (18 months ago), the Joint Committee on Printing directed that the continuously-updated version of CONAN be made available online as a searchable PDF, but it still is not. Many organizations have asked that the underlying document be published online in its original (XML) format, which is more user friendly than a PDF, and would take minimal effort to release.

This upcoming year, the Constitution Annotated will be up for its once-a-decade print edition. With at least 4,870 statutorily mandated copies, at an estimated cost of $226, the House and Senate will pay over $1.1 million for a document that will go out of date almost immediately. We suggest that some of these costs may be recouped by asking House offices if they wish to receive a print copy, as a continuously updated web version is already made available to all congressional offices. Regardless, we urge that the web version that is already made available to congressional offices also be made available to the American people in its web friendly format. While publishing the document as a PDF would be a small step forward, the best use of taxpayer dollars to maximize usability would be to publish it in XML, the format in which it is prepared.

Other Provisions

Sunlight support additional measures in the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill. Those provisions include:

The reinstatement of the Office of Technology Assessment, as proposed by Rep. Rush Holt last year. OTA provided Congress http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/taxonomy/term/Office-of-Technology-Assessment/ with the “means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology.

Inclusion of the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which would would gather together all reports to Congress from federal agencies in one place. It requires that they be published online by GPO in bulk, in open formats, and in a timely fashion, so that people can easily learn about the work of the federal government. The legislation would not require any additional appropriation, and would bring much needed transparency and coordination. It has already passed the Committee on Oversight and Government reform, was introduced in the Senate, and is awaiting action by the House.

Avoiding decreasing funding levels for the House of Representatives and certain legislative support agencies below the subcommittee proposal. Funding for the House has already diminished by at least 10% over the last two years. This raises the concern that congressional staff may become more susceptible to influence from lobbyists, and that support entities (like GPO, the Clerk, and the Library of Congress) that have transparency roles will be less able to fulfill their missions.

Publishing the House Expenditure Reports in a data-friendly format such as CSV. The quarterly reports contain all spending by the House of Representatives, and are currently published online as a PDF. Starting in 2009, then Speaker-Pelosi began publishing House Expenditure Reports online, which was a significant step forward in making them available, as they had only been published in giant books. Unfortunately, publishing columns of data in a PDF does not allow for the data to be analyzed. Simply put, we're only halfway to House spending transparency. The Sunlight Foundation goes through significant effort to scrape the data from the PDFs and put them into spreadsheets, but this should really be done by the House. It would increase accuracy and timeliness -- and so long as the House releases the information, it should do so in the most useful way possible.

Today 30 organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information. Our joint letters to congressional appropriators and rulemakers urges Congress to direct that the THOMAS legislative database be published online and to establish an advisory committee on further improvements.

THOMAS, Congress' legislative information website that provides basic information about legislative and congressional actions, has fallen far behind the needs of its users. Many have turned to important websites like GovTrack, OpenCongress, and WashingtonWatch to monitor congressional activities.

These sites and others, which repackage and add important context to legislative activities, extract data from the THOMAS website through a painstaking and often brittle process. To make this process easier and more reliable, the Library of Congress should publish THOMAS information "in bulk," which makes the entire legislative database available for download at once, instead of publishing information in such a way that it can only be gathered by scraping data from hundreds or thousands of webpages.

Bulk access to legislative information is already common practice inside and outside the government. For example,

•  The Government Printing Office publishes six major databases, including the Federal Register, in bulk;
•  The House's Office of Law Revision Counsel publishes the U.S. Code in bulk;
•  New Jersey and New Hampshire publish their legislative information in bulk; and
•  Data.gov has nearly 400,000 datasets available in bulk, including 4,395 high-value datasets.

The transparency community, technology innovators, journalists, good government organizations, and private companies have long sought bulk access to legislative data. In May 2007, a coalition of organizations called on Congress to "embrace structured data by publishing the status of legislation and other information to the web ... in structured data formats". In 2009, Congress articulated support for bulk access to legislative data in an explanatory statement accompanying an appropriations bill. And in November 2011 one of the action items emerging from the House's Congressional Facebook Hackathon was an endorsement of releasing "structured machine-readable legislative data ... in a bulk format."

This past year the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Open Congress submitted testimony to House Appropriators calling for bulk access to legislative information. We applaud the major strides made by the House of Representatives in improving public access to the House's legislative information, but what's missing is the kind of information only available through the THOMAS website. This includes bill summaries, bill status information, bill co-sponsors, and other information that provides important context for legislation.

We estimate that for every person that goes directly to the THOMAS website, at least two people visit a third-party website. But even these sites must rely on legislative information generated and maintained by Congress, which is only available through the difficult-to-use THOMAS website. There will always be a need for a congressionally-mandated website, but Congress should ensure that the innovative and transformative uses of legislative information by third parties is grounded upon accurate and timely data. And that means providing bulk access to everyone.

Organizations encourage rulemakers to publish THOMAS legislative information in bulk

Organizations urge appropriators to publish THOMAS data in bulk

Yesterday's Legistorm report on congressional staffers-turned-lobbyists provides more support for the theory that Congress is turning over its work to special interests. It adds to a mountain of evidence that includes an expanding pay gap between House staff and their private sector equivalents, fewer policy staff in Congress, and significant new cuts in staff positions and pay.

Looking at a decade's worth of data, Legistorm found that "5,400 people have been both lobbyists and received paychecks as staff from the legislative branch in the past decade." The report adds that it's likely that at least 2,900 former staffers are currently lobbying, with 605 current congressional staff having served as lobbyists in the past decade. These numbers are likely low, both because the number of federally registered lobbyists does not include many people who lobby and data available for the study was incomplete (missing "perhaps hundreds of potential staffer-lobbyist matches.")

Having inside connections is a big help to the bottom line for staffers-turned-lobbyists, according to two research papers. Lobbyists who are connected to members of Congress get paid more than those who are only experts. In addition, lobbyists who worked for a US Senator "suffer a 24% drop in revenue -- around $177,000 -- when their ex-employers leave office." In Washington, who you know is more important than what you know.

That influence is only magnified when Congress cannot effectively evaluate claims made by lobbyists. Unfortunately, Congress has been shrinking its pool of experienced staff for over two decades. According to my review of data going back to 1979, "there are fewer House staff and fewer legislative support agency personnel now that at any time in the recent past." House personal office, committee, and leadership staff are at 87% of their 1979 levels. Committee staff alone are at 62% of their 1979 levels, having eliminated 755 positions. Major legislative support agencies have suffered tremendous losses, and are at 65% of their 1979 staffing levels. GAO, the investigative arm of Congress that looks at the public purse, is at 60% of its 1979 staffing level; CRS is at 80%. While government has grown more complex, there are fewer congressional staff to provide oversight, and they cannot help but rely upon the army of lobbyists whose influence has expanded to fill the vacuum. It's no wonder that $3.51 billion was spent on lobbying in 2010.

The reduced congressional capacity to handle influence has an effect on decision-making. For example, a recent look at lobbying during the financial crisis found that mortgage-lending companies that lobbied prior to the financial crisis engaged in riskier lending practices and were more likely to be bailed out.

With these institutional factors at play, it's no surprise that staff are leaving to go to the private sector. A review of two decades of staff salary surveys shows that the leading factors that drive out staff are unpredictable work hours and low pay. The high turnover rate and youthful median staff age puts Congress at a disadvantage when dealing with the Executive branch or the private sector.

This trend is only going to accelerate. The House Appropriations Committee has adopted what it called "the largest ever two-year reduction for the legislative branch." For upcoming fiscal year 2012, which starts on October 1, the House Appropriations Committee has endorsed a 6.46% cut to the House of Representatives, which on top of the FY 2011 cuts decreases the House's budget by 10.4% over two years. By way of example, the amount of money available to each personal office for a Member of Congress will be reduced by around $90,000. Since most office costs are fixed and staff pay is already effectively frozen, this likely will translate into staff reductions and pay cuts. Put another way, if you add up all spending for the legislative branch, including expenditures for security, all the support agencies, the visitor center, and so on, the proposed 2012 budget is $4.38 billion. By contrast, the total federal budget is $3.82 trillion. That's a small amount of money when compared to its responsibility to set the direction for the entire government.

Tomorrow, the Senate Appropriations Committee will markup its Legislative Branch Appropriations bill, determining how much pain to mete out to Senate personal, committee, and leadership offices. At the same time, it will determine whether to agree to the House's huge cuts to the Government Printing Office (16%), the Library of Congress (8%), Government Accountability Office (6.4%), and other important legislative support agencies. The future of many staff now includes earlier retirement, furloughs, and a bare minimum of resources.

All of these problems are compounded by Congress's lack of introspection about the work that it does and our inability to track these exertion of influence by special interests. It's true that there are important ongoing legislative efforts to close these lobbying disclosure loopholes, most notably the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act, and a broad consensus about what to do about lobbying. And there are some efforts to make more congressional information publicly available, so that the public can figure out what's going on. Unfortunately, we are far from where we need to be if we want an effective Congress that capably balances its dual roles as policymaker and agent of the people.

This Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee will markup legislation that appropriates funding for the electronic government fund. The e-gov fund supports many of the Obama administration's flagship transparency initiatives, including data.gov, the IT spending dashboard, and USASpending.gov, as well as initiatives like data center consolidation. The House Appropriations Committee voted in June to reduce e-gov funding from $34m to $13-16m and to restructure it by rolling it into a broader "Information and Engagement for Citizens" fund.

The House's initially-proposed draconian cuts to the e-gov fund caused significant controversy, prompting Sunlight's #savethedata campaign, a public letter from major organizations and notable individuals, letters from Senator Tom Carper and former federal CIO Vivek Kundra, and statements from Rep. Darrell Issa,  Rep. Jose Serrano, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

It is unclear at this time whether the Senate will go along with the House's proposed restructuring of the fund as well as the disproportionate reduction in its funding levels. If the cuts go forward, new federal CIO Steven Van Roekel will make to make difficult decisions about which programs to cut or kill. We'll keep you posted.

The Electronic Government Fund would likely receive around $13m for FY2012 if Congress agrees with today's 27-21 vote by the House Appropriations Committee to adopt the Financial Services and General Government appropriation bill. The legislation now advances to the full House. It's increasingly likely that e-gov fund will increase from the $8m appropriated in FY 2011, a modest move in the right direction, albeit a far cry from the $34m appropriated in both FY 2009 and 2010. The full committee effectively ratified the subcommittee's vote last week on funding.

This appropriations bill makes a substantial change to the e-gov fund by replacing it with a new fund, the "Information and Engagement for Citizens" fund, that combines e-gov with the pre-existing "Federal Citizen Services Fund." According to the report accompanying the legislation, this new fund's purpose is "to provide electronic or other methods of providing access and understanding of Federal information, benefits, and services to citizens, businesses, other governments, and the media."

All in all, $50,000,000 will be appropriated to the new fund. It appears that the Information and Engagement for Citizens fund can be topped off to $60,000,000 through additional revenues and collections -- i.e. reimbursements from federal agencies, users fees for publications ordered by the public, payments from private entities for services rendered, and gifts from the public.

How will this break out? The draft legislation would appropriate $50m to e-gov and OCS, and last year OCS was cut from $37m to $34m. If we assume that OCS has been returned to a $37m funding level, that leaves $13m for e-gov.

The legislative report also includes a report-back provision, where OMB is expected to submit to the appropriations committee "a detailed expenditure plan prior to obligation of funds under this account. The plan should describe the projects selected, and the budget, timeline, objectives and expected benefits and savings realized for each project."

We hope that the plan will be reported publicly, so that we can see how these funds will be expended.

Will the American people be able to watch online as members of Congress discuss how much money to spend on the House of Representatives next year? Probably not, as this Thursday's hearing will take place in a room without cameras, even through the main committee room is wired to the internet and apparently available.*

The in-person-only nature of the hearing conflicts with the newly adopted House Rules, which require “to the maximum extent practicable, each committee shall --”

provide audio and video coverage of each hearing or meeting for the transaction of business in a manner that allows the public to easily listen to and view the proceedings.

Last year, Speaker Boehner moved to ensure that the House Rules Committee could broadcasting video of its proceedings in its main hearing room. At the time, he said, “given the important business conducted there, we feel strongly that the American people should have the ability to watch the Committee in action.” The same argument can be made here.

In light of the serious and important efforts being undertaken by the House leadership to move Congress into the electronic age, the Appropriations Committee should hold its hearings as possible in the main room whenever possible, starting with this one, until cameras are installed in its subcommittee rooms.

~ Phone calls requesting comment were not immediately returned, but I do hope to have an update when we hear back.

Last week, Congress spent $1.1 trillion tax dollars by combining six pieces of appropriations ("spending") legislation into one 1,000+ page "minibus" bill and passing it with almost no public disclosure or debate.  In fact, the bill was available to the public online for less than 24 hours.

Before December 18th, Congress will be taking up the last remaining 2010 appropriations bill: Defense.  If history is any lesson, Congress will likely try to cram different pieces of legislation into this final bill, and these new bills will be those that were unable to pass previously on their own.  If the new bills are included in the Defense appropriation bill at the last minute, the public won't know what's going on until after the bill is passed.

It's imperative that we have the ability to read the bill online not only before it's passed, but before it's debated, so we can call our representatives while there's still time to have an impact on what they spend our money on.

The craziest part of this whole thing (Capitol Hill finds these things to be "normal") is that the legislation Congress will try to insert may not have anything to do with defense. Raising the nation's debt limit and various health care reforms are two possible inclusions.  By "drafting" behind the Defense bill their chance of passing Congress increases.

And while debt limit and health care reform provisions are at least being discussed in the media, it is the laws we can't see, that have never been debated in the open, that are the most dangerous threat.

Example: the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that was slipped into an omnibus bill back in 2000.  The text was only available for 24 hours and its inclusion in the omnibus was only known for 4 minutes before final consideration.  The passage of the Act not only created the "Enron loophole" but a market of unregulated derivatives which contributed to near economic collapse in late 2008.

Last week, as Congress dropped and passed the minibus appropriations bill, the ridiculousness of not making the bill available online for 72 hours was frustrating and disappointing. Even for the team here at the Sunlight Foundation, who were watching very closely, the $1.1 trillion minibus bill had passed before we could do so much as send an email alert!

It was perhaps most distressing because we now KNOW Congress can make major legislation available for 72 hours before it's debated; we've seen them do it throughout the health care debate. Appropriations don't get the same public pressure as health care so our representatives decided not to give us time to go through the massive spending bill - which added up to be more spending than the Stimulus package.

This week, Congress has a chance to redeem themselves with the one remaining spending bill of the year, and we'll be demanding they get it right.

Post by Jake Brewer with contributions from Noah Kunin.

Image credit by id-iom

Noted curmudgeon David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, yesterday issued a disobliging statement towards the cause of transparency. In heralding his work in crafting a 357-page appropriations super-package in secret Obey launched his defense to Bloomberg, "You're damn right it has [been done in secret] because if it's done in the public it would never get done."

Were the bill done in an open process, colleagues may waste time "pontificating." Perhaps, they may also consider "reading," or "understanding," this $600 billion bill. Lawmakers may even consider "knowing what they're voting on." But, of course, who are the elected representatives of government to decide how $600 billion is allocated? They should just follow the dictates of their party leadership on how to vote.

Of course, as the Wisonsinite Obey waved his paw at the notion of openness the Rules Committee met to approve the bill. Not seen by many lawmakers, the bill reported out of the Committee at 7:11 pm last night. And guess what's on the suspension calendar for voting today? That's right! Obey's 357-page, $600 billion appropriations bill.

Ready those stopwatchs and start reading ... now. Can you finish this bill before it's time to vote? Say, 5 o'clock.