Today, Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) reintroduced legislation that will make it easier for the public, the media, and government employees to better understand the important policy matters facing Congress. The bipartisan "Public Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Resolution of 2013," H.Res.110, would ensure that these reports, which are often cited by courts and the media and sold by third parties for $20 per copy, are freely available to the public on a website maintained by the House Clerk.

When Representatives Lance and Quigley introduced this resolution in the 112th Congress we praised the bill, noting that "reliable access to CRS Reports would ensure that everyone has timely and comprehensive access to the collective wisdom of hundreds of analysts and experts on political issues when they're at their most salient." This is perhaps even more important today with controversial issues like the sequester and gun control tying our legislature in knots. A few non-profit organizations manage to make some of these reports freely available, but only the CRS can do this in a truly comprehensive manner.

The resolution opens the doors to greater public understanding of Congress and should be applauded and supported.

More than 30 organizations have signed on to a letter supporting the resolution. If you want to learn more about the importance of making CRS reports publicly available, please take the time to read the letter, which is embedded below.

Open CRS Resolution Support Letter

Earlier today I testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch on lifting a publishing restriction on CRS general distribution products and granting the public bulk access to THOMAS data. What follows is my oral testimony, and I've embedded the written testimony at the end of the blogpost.

Comments of the Sunlight Foundation before the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Legislative Branch May 11, 2011

Chairman Crenshaw, Ranking Member Honda, and members of the Committee, thank you for allowing me to to appear before you today.

My name is Daniel Schuman, and I am the Policy Counsel for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to increase government openness and transparency. I am here to speak with you today about empowering the Congressional Research Service to better serve Congress and the American people, and to encourage this committee to follow-up on its languishing request regarding public access to the raw legislative information that powers THOMAS.

Taxpayers spend around $100 million a year to fund CRS and its nearly 700 staff members. As an administrative unit of the Library of Congress, CRS often furthers the Library's public mission, and its products help frame public debate on important issues. As an example, in the last two years, major newspapers cited CRS reports 779 times; over the last decade, federal courts have cited CRS Reports 130 times.

All the while, the Library of Congress's ability to pay for publishing costs has been restricted, by legislative branch appropriations language, for every year since 1952.

This 59-year-old publishing rule was likely intended as a cost-savings measure, a leftover from a bygone era of expensive layout, printing, and distribution costs. It also precedes CRS's creation by nearly two decades. Times have changed, and these print limitations are a counterproductive anachronism in the Internet age. A coalition of 38 organizations recently wrote to you to urge an end to the restriction, and I am here to do so in person today.

Congressional staff already google for CRS reports, review Cornell's Constitution Annotated website to learn about Supreme Court decisions, search YouTube for briefings on Federal Law, and look to OpenCongress.org for legislative summaries. Unfortunately, CRS has not kept up with the times, and embraces an overbroad interpretation of the publishing restriction – transforming a speed bump into a road block – thereby stifling its ability to innovate, meet the needs of its clients, and fulfill its public responsibilities. In short, you should lift the publishing restriction and send CRS an unmistakable signal to modernize.

Let me be clear: I am not requesting that all CRS reports be made publicly available. One-on-one communications between CRS and individual Members of Congress or their staff are and ought to be confidential.

Instead, I ask that the Committee grant CRS the flexibility to release general distribution products online without excuse or fear of violating an antiquated publishing restriction. Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor recently encouraged the Clerk of the House to develop better online tools to make legislative information more open, and Congress more accountable, to the American people. CRS, the source of much legislative information, should be similarly open.

With respect to THOMAS, in 2009, this committee adopted a forward-thinking approach that required a report on the issues around granting the American people access to all electronic legislative information at once – through a method known as “bulk” access.

Nearly three years later, as far as we know, no such report has been generated. A reason why is that the trigger for the release of the report was the launch of Legislative Information System 2.0, which has not happened and likely will never happen as envisioned.

The world has not waited. In the interim, GPO has published five datasets online in bulk, including the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register. Data.gov was launched in May 2009 and now has hundreds of thousands of datasets. Technologists are already using this information, in new and exciting ways, that enhance the public's access to government information.

In the same way, providing bulk access to THOMAS data would give technology innovators an opportunity to creatively use data to solve new problems and address unmet needs. It would put all of this important legislative information into the American people's hands.

We ask for your renewed attention to this unheeded directive and urge you to make up for lost time. The committee should grant the public bulk access to legislative documents, bill status and summary information, and other legislative data no later than 120 days after the start of FY 2012. We also ask for the immediate creation of an advisory committee, composed of relevant legislative agency employees and members of the public, that will meet regularly to address the public's need for access to this information, and the means by which it is provided. Finally, as mentioned before, we ask that you end the publishing restriction.

This committee has the unparalleled opportunity to make government more open and accountable. We hope that you seize the moment. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I look forward to your questions.

Daniel Schuman Testimony Appropriations Subcommittee 2011-05-11

The White House blog recently wrote about Obama's trip to India and mentioned that US-based organizations could learn from Indian organizations using technology to improve accountability and transparency. I agreed. Now is a great time for the US government to recognize that there are  transparency policies all over the world that we Americans could implement or, at a bare minimum, learn from. Here are just a few foreign governments that have policies we wish would improve what we have state-side:

You get a dataset! And you get a dataset! Everyone gets a dataset!

There is always progress to be made and the presumption to make data public and online (with teeth!) is an important cultural shift we hope to see soon. Just last week the United Kingdom took an unprecedented step to publicize all government spending over 25,0000 pounds. As governments around the world tighten their belts we think making the books fully transparent will allow citizens to be better informed about where their tax dollars go and how to move forward. Here in the US there is the Data.gov site (which could be greatly improved) and we are encouraged that the culture is shifting as we see folks like the United Nations, the World Bank, Russia, Spain, Finland, Australia and many others hopping on board.

Publicly Funded Research Papers Available to the Public

The Congressional Research Service, often referred to as 'Congress' think tank', is a well-respected non-partisan branch of the Library of Congress that regularly publishes reports exclusively for members of Congress and their staff at a budget over $100 million. The Sunlight Foundation and others have long advocated for these reports to be public (meaning online), but they remain inaccessible to the general public.

Many foreign governments have publicly-funded think tanks similar to CRS, but they make the reports free to the public and accessible online. The United Kingdom has the House of Commons Library Research Papers, Canada has a nice list with categories on the site of their Library of Parliament Research Publications, and Australia publishes their reports (going back to 1993!) on the Parliament of Australia's Parliamentary Library website. Australia even has official research reports published on the state level by the websites of Victoria and New South Wales.

Imagine that.

Creating Better Disclosure Surrounding Resource Management

The US could learn a thing or two from other resource-rich countries about disclosing online searchable production, leases, costs, audits, and safety reports. This important non-proprietary information keeps the public informed about the safety and financial status of our natural resources. We hope the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) that replaced the Minerals Management Service (MMS) will take the necessary steps that many countries have already taken to improve online reporting in this sector.

The Revenue Watch Institute and Transparency International recently rated the top 41 oil, gas and mineral producing countries countries in terms of their government disclosure record [pdf link]. The United States came in at 11th place, behind Russia, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ecuador and others. This ranking assessed revenue transparency more than safety records, but it is an important metric to recognize how much the US government could continue to learn. Let's see less of this and more online disclosure like Angola.

Expanding and Enriching Visitor Logs

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has a portion of the official website dedicated to transparency initiatives including some substantive items that we would love to see in the US. We appreciate what the White House has done with releasing visitor logs, but a glance across the pond shows that Number 10 is posting details of meetings, hospitality, gifts and overseas travel across all departments and high level staff. Impressive stuff when you compare it to the White House offerings.

Online Disclosure Forms

The Australian equivalent of the Federal Election Commission, known down under as the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), has a great online system to research financial documents relating to the elections.  It includes a nice financial disclosure and donor search function that is quite similar to the FEC version (both obviously don't hold a candle to Sunlight's illuminative version), but after some more research I discovered that they allow those who have to file* to do so through disclosure forms online!  We didn't venture beyond the sleek registration page, but it gave us goosebumps to see other countries approaching our vision of real-time online disclosure. We would like to see this type of online filing possible for lobbying, elections or even meetings - it would certainly ease the eyes of our reporters who often have to dig through .pdf image files.

• In Australia the political system requires candidates and Senate groups, registered political parties and their associated entities, and donors and third parties to lodge disclosure returns. Swoon!

It would be impossible to ignore that each country listed in the items above has a unique political system, but these examples serve as great starting points for policies that could work here, now. The Sunlight Foundation will continue to encourage dialogue on these important issues and hope that the US government learns from non-profits and governments all over the world.

Yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a resolution (S. Res. 118), with a bipartisan cast of cosponsors, to allow for the public release of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. CRS reports are some of the best research documents in the nation and are currently used by lawmakers and their staff to inform their decisions and help in crafting legislation. Currently, CRS reports are not supposed to be released to the public, however, some web sites collect them from lawmaker offices distributing them anonymously. Many of these sites are pay sites, save for Open CRS, which is operated by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

CDT lauds the new Lieberman resolution in a blog post:

The public can also purchase copies of the reports from CRS report resellers, but obtaining copies of all the reports that are relevant would cost a great deal of money for reports that are entirely taxpayer funded in the first place. Senate Resolution 118 would change that by allowing lawmakers to provide access to CRS services to the public on official website. Rather than creating a new tool for public access, the resolution would let Members and Committees share reports with the public using the same online services that are available on Congress’ internal CRS website.

Critically, the new resolution also requires that an index of CRS issue briefs and reports to be made public. Currently, Open CRS receives updates on reports as they are published from an anonymous lawmaker, but a public index of reports would simplify this process. It would be simple to provide this index, and to let the public know what their lawmakers are reading- and for them to read it too. It is high time for an officially sanctioned, free way to distribute the reports to the people.

This is a resolution that deserves strong support. The free release of CRS reports has always been a top priority of The Open House Project.