As I wrote yesterday, each day seems to bring a small step forward on improving public access to legislative information, with two notable developments today.

First, Rep. Honda gave a tantalizing hint of progress on bulk access to legislative data at this morning's subcommittee markup of the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill (sorry no video). He said that "there is exhaustive discussion on bulk data downloads in the [sub]committee report." It's not clear exactly what this means -- the subcommittee report won't be made available to the public until the full committee markup, which is tentatively scheduled in two weeks -- but it's an indication that public attention has joined with bipartisan support from appropriators, overseers, and leadership to make progress on making legislative information available to the American people.

From what I've heard, the pushback is coming largely from the support agencies, although the nature of those concerns are not clear. With the Law Library of Congress taking the lead on THOMAS in recent years, including making some small but useful changes to the site, there is hope that they will grow into their role as facilitators of online transparency. All along, the public interest community has been asking for bulk access to THOMAS data and the creation of an advisory committee on THOMAS.

Second, the objections raised by legislative support agencies are not particularly weighty, at least according to a 2008 memo from the Library of Congress to the Committee on House Administration regarding the availability of THOMAS data. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time it's been made accessible to the public. What's notable is how the Library of Congress was technologically positioned to deliver on legislative data transparency four years ago, but apparently did not move forward. At a minimum, it should alleviate concerns about the difficulty of technological implementation.

According to the memo, the Library expected to finish developing an XML database containing bill metadata such as bill summaries, status of bills, and information on co-sponsors four years ago (in May 2008.) What's revealing about this is that much of the information about legislation has been available in a structured database for nearly half a decade -- and in the kind of format that developers need.

Moreover, the Library reports that "the resources will be available to copy the database daily into an Anonymous File Transfer Protocol [FTP] site so it is accessible to the public" by the time the LIS 2.0 database is completed. This would allow the data to be made available in bulk. (There are better ways to do so, but this is an acceptable solution.)

Also at the time of the memo, March 2008, full text of bills and committee reports were available on GPO Access, but not in XML. From what we can tell, nearly all bills are now available in XML, although it is unclear whether committee reports are prepared in XML. All of this could also be made available in bulk using the technology described in the memo.

The memo raises one major policy implication concerning who owns the data, contemplating that it belongs to the House, Senate, Congressional Research Service, and Government Printing Office. In the literal sense, that's backwards: the information is owned by the American people and held in trust by Congress and its legislative agencies. These entities do serve as repositories of the information, however, and deserve consideration as to the technological means by which it is made available. However, that's with the understanding that these entities should strive to meet the public's need for the information and expansively follow the policies set by Congress in favor of transparency.

We'll continue to keep a close eye on how all this develops.

Library of Congress letter to Committee on House Administration on THOMAS

This Tuesday, there will be hearing on budgets for the Library of Congress, the Government Printing Office, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office. It's too bad that the public won't have a real opportunity to learn about these important agencies, as the meeting is not expected to be webcast by the committee, and (if I remember correctly) the hearing room is so tiny that few if any members of the public will be able to attend.

That's too bad, especially because this is the first opportunity to hear firsthand how last year's budget cuts have affected agencies' abilities to do their jobs, and learn about agency and congressional priorities for the upcoming year. It's also the first time we'll hear from the new acting Public Printer  (the head of GPO); and perhaps the newly appointed head of the Congressional Research Service will be presented and introduced by the Librarian of Congress.

Only the House and Senate Legislative Appropriations Committees regularly hold annual public hearings on the workings of these agencies; the oversight committees (Committee on House Administration and Senate Rules) generally do not, and the Joint Committee on the Library and Joint Committee on Printing no longer holds substantive meetings in public.

The new House rules require that all committees provide "audio and video coverage of each hearing or meeting" that "allows the public to easily listen ... and view the proceedings" "to the maximum extent practicable." All of the House committees have at least one hearing room that is equipped with a camera, and the House Recording Studio will provide a camera upon a committee's request. Unfortunately, this hearing is being held in a room without a camera, and I've been informed that the Committee has not requested one. The Appropriations Committee has not scheduled any other hearings for Tuesday, so the room with the pre-positioned camera should be available.

We ran into this problem last year, when the Committee's justification for holding the meeting in the same  tiny, camera-less room (HT-2) was that it was more convenient to hold the hearing in the Capitol than in one of the legislative buildings. Even if convenience were more important than  the public access rule, the House Recording Studio could still provide a camera, and there are rooms in the newly constructed $600+ million Capitol Visitor Center (i.e. in the Capitol) that already have cameras installed. We would send a video crew ourselves, but only organizations accredited by the House Radio-Television Correspondents' Gallery can ask permission from the Committee to record the event, and the Sunlight Foundation doesn't qualify for membership.

Another change from last year is that members of the public are not invited to speak at the hearing, although they may submit written comments. Along with several others, I took the opportunity to speak last year, where I called for bulk access to THOMAS data and public access to CRS reports. I will submit comments for the record, but written comments are much less effective than speaking directly to the Members of Congress. It's too bad, especially because one of the major lessons of last Thursday's House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference  is that the Library of Congress and GPO have apparently been ignoring their legal obligation to make progress on public access to bulk data. Ironically, it was this very Committee that imposed the obligation upon them in the first place, 3 years ago.

As with everything in Congress, things could still change for Tuesday's hearing -- its time, date, location, and whether it will webcast or covered by the media. I plan on attending, and if I can make it into the room, I'll post an update.

The following are my notes for remarks I delivered at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on February 2, 2012. They've been updated to include hyperlinks, but were delivered largely as written. The official page for the conference, with video, is here.

Thank you to Matt Lira and Steve Dwyer for the introduction, and to the House of Representatives for holding such an important and timely conference. This kind of event has been a long time in coming.

I must acknowledge the excellent panels that have been happening all day. And I would be remiss if I didn't commend the Committee on House Administration for adopting "standards for the electronic posting of house and committee documents and data," which are already transforming the House in a very positive way.

Because I'm limited to 10 minutes, let me briefly commend three documents to all of you which lay out a transparency vision in greater breath and detail than is possible here. They are the Open House Project Report, the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Data, and the report from the Congressional Facebook Hackathon.

I've been asked to speak about benchmarks for measuring success in making legislative data available online. I feel like a kid in a candy store, but I will try to restrain myself.  When I speak about the House, please construe my remarks as applying to the Senate and the legislative support agencies as well.

What is Transparency For?

In determining benchmarks, it's incumbent on us to assess, at least briefly: what good is online transparency anyway? Here's how I see transparency adding value to our political process. It provides relevant information to decisionmakers at the time they need it. It levels the playing field between the special interests and everyone else so we all have an equal opportunity to find out what's going on. It lets the American people and their elected representatives have a solid basis for a conversation about priorities. It helps congress work more efficiently, by eliminating redundancies and identifying bottlenecks. It allows the agencies to better understand what they're supposed to do. It helps businesses make money by improving their ability to predict government actions. And most importantly, transparency is the cornerstone of a democracy.

This is all pretty ethereal, so I'll get to the point. To the maximum extent possible, legislative information must be available online, in real time, and in machine readable formats. With the exception of internal deliberations protected by the speech or debate clause, or national security and some personnel matters, the Congress's business is the people's business. So let me break down this formulation of online, in real time, and in machine readable formats into concrete benchmarks.

Online Publication

Publishing information online is a major hurdle in of itself. A lot of information isn't online, but instead is only available if you know the right person, or go to the right room and ask for a hardcopy, and so on. Should you have to know someone on staff to get a copy of the chairman's mark on a bill before it's voted on? Do we really want to make people trudge down to the House's legislative resource center to print out documents at 10 cents a page? It certainly cannot make any sense to have to request a CRS report through your representative or pay 20 bucks online to buy a copy.

Almost as bad as the failure to publish online is secrecy through obscurity. If information is locked inside an image file and not susceptible to a search engine, or is in an entirely random location, or is hidden on page 400 of the congressional record, it's not really helpful to anyone.

In addition, old information can be just as important as newly created information. For example, there's a huge gap in the availability of committee reports. Along the same lines, while ignorance of the law is no defense for a crime, the actual enactment of the law, known as the Statutes are Large, is not available online for a nearly 80-year period.

Let me offer some concrete benchmarks by which we can judge improvements on this.

1. The House of Representatives should conduct an audit of all the different types of information it produces and releases, including whether it's online, and where it can be found.

2. To the extent the House (or legislative support agencies) has information that is already in electronic format -- from the documents in the Clerk's office to CRS reports to hearing transcripts -- that information should be put online in whatever format its currently in. It's also worth considering whether legislative data should include sometimes released items like Dear Colleagues and Whip notices. We can worry later about improving how this information is made available, but just to start, put them online.

Real-time publication

Moving on, let's now talk about real-time publication. This is the kind of idea that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I'd suggest a common-sense starting point: think about the time frame and context in which a document is used. An amendment that's going to be voted on in 2 hours needs to be online just as soon as it's drafted. A bill that's going to be voted on in 2 legislative days needs to go up pretty quickly as well. You should know about a committee hearing a week in advance. Other items, like the House disbursement reports, can take a little longer.

Don't get me wrong. The goal should be real-time publication for everything. But the evaluation of what that means in the short term can be context dependent. But that context changes if the document is originally created in digital format -- in that circumstances, there shouldn't be any wait.

Here are some benchmarks:

1. All committee reports, amendments, and bills should be available online as they are introduced. The House should monitor the lag time between introduction and when they appear on THOMAS or the committee websites. I've done this, and it can be a while before some bills show up. Evaluate the extent of the problem, and work to reduce it.

2. All hearing notices should be available online 7 days prior to the hearing.

3. Many committees are skirting House rules about publishing video of hearings. House appropriators are particularly guilty of this. The House should review whether meetings are being held in rooms where video capability exists natively or could be added through use of the House's video service, and pester the committees if they're opting out of recording. When only one meeting in a particular committee is going on at a time, it should be streamed online so long as it is open to the public. It's time to review behavior and start slapping some wrists. Perhaps the House should create a mechanism for the public to report on non-webcast hearings.

Machine Readability

So let's move on to discuss machine-readable formats. This is what really allows the idea of House of Representatives as a platform for democracy to succeed.

The biggest wish of many staffers is to be able to dynamically see how an amendment would modify a bill,  how that bill would change the law, (and eventually how an agency would promulgate a regulation, how the courts interpret that regulation, and back to congress again.) Along the same lines, people looking at a bill want to know if there are other, similar bills, in this congress or in previous ones, whether there are committee reports, CRS and GAO evaluations, and so on. If you cannot find a way to tie this information together, this dream becomes impossible.

Legislative data needs to be released as highly structured data. In other words, a machine needs to be able to look at the content and "know" what it is looking at. This would require the use of languages like XML, which allows this kind of value-added context. But to make it work, we also need a way to uniquely describe people and bills and amendments and so on -- cleverly enough embodied in commonly-accepted unique identifiers. There are already tons of these identifiers being used, but the House needs to consistently and widely employ them.

Sometimes, structured language is used when creating a document, or unique identifiers are used to describe data items in a document, but that document is stripped naked before it is released to the public. There are some circumstances where this makes sense, like hiding the different internal drafts of a bill. But most of the time, it serves no real purpose. The data that's removed could be very helpful to those on the outside. Leave it in.

Let me add that PDFs, especially PDFs that are image files, do not promote transparency. They make it difficult to impossible to extract data from documents. If you must use a PDF, make sure that the underlying data is available some other way as well.

That brings me to a point about how the data is made available. A lot of transparency advocates build scrapers to try to transform data that's published online and put it back into a useful structure. Josh Tauburer, for example, scrapes THOMAS to turn it into a database. It's like trying to unscramble an egg.

Legislative data, such as that in THOMAS, should be made available online in bulk. Give folks the database all at once or in very large chunks, and let them figure out how to use it. (See our wiki page for more resources regarding how to improve THOMAS.)

Here are my benchmarks:

1. All bills, amendments, and votes should be published online in XML, or some other structured format. Make scrapers unnecessary.

2. End the tyranny of only publishing in PDFs. House expenditure reports are a giant database -- publish them as a spreadsheet file, not a PDF. The Constitution Annotated is prepared in XML, don't publish it as a PDF.

3. Encourage the use of unique identifiers, whether they come from inside the House or elsewhere. The data needs to be interoperable.

Concluding Remarks

My time is running short, so I will only make two more comments about process.

First, today's conference, and the standards released by the House in December, are a good thing.

As a benchmark, we need to have another conference like this one within the next year as a way of assessing how well we have done, and we should continue with these conferences on a regular basis.

Second, we need to foster collaboration between those inside and outside government. In particular, technologists who are trying to use legislative data need to be able to get technology questions answered by the responsible internal stakeholder. And policy works can help provide direction so that the new services developed by the House meet the needs of the public. I suggest:

1. The creation of a standing committee, composed of internal and external stakeholders, that meets at least quarterly, if not monthly, to discuss these issues.

2.  A listserv where people who are not in DC can engage in this discussion with people inside and outside of government.

I appreciate your time and the opportunity to speak. Thank you very much.

Roll Call is reporting that Dr. Mary Mazanec has been named as the new Director of the Congressional Research Service by Librarian of Congress James Billington. (The Library of Congress has password protected its press releases, so a direct link is not possible.) Dr. Mazanec has served as the Congressional Research Service's Acting Director since April; she was selected by former CRS Director Dan Mulhollan to serve as his Deputy Director effective on August 30, 2010. (Mulhollan served as CRS Director starting in January 1994.) Prior to joining CRS, from 2002-2010, Dr. Mazanec worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In February, a coalition of organizations wrote to Dr. Billington to "ask you to appoint a Director of CRS who will help advance the goal of online free public access to CRS reports."  In May, the Advisory Committee on Transparency hosted a panel discussion on the future of CRS; the video is online here. We congratulate Dr. Mazanec on her new position, and hope that she will work to bring CRS fully into the 21st century.

This Wednesday, the House of Representatives will host an unprecedented public meeting from 3:30-7:30 to discuss how the public can get better access to congressional information. While the event is called the "Congressional Facebook Hackathon," what will take place is much broader than the name suggests. Wednesday will present an opportunity for technologists and policy wonks to talk about and collaborate on improving how congressional information is made available to the public. It has important bipartisan hosts, Reps. Eric Cantor and Steny Hoyer, who deserve significant credit for coming together on this important transparency issue.

The event will start with short opening presentations by the House of Representatives on its open data initiatives and Facebook on its latest platform updates. Afterward, participants will break out into discussion groups, focusing on legislative data/workflow, constituent correspondence, casework, and press/ public relations. Of course, there will be sufficient flexibility for the conversation to follow the interests of the participants.

There have been several previous collaborative efforts by members of the transparency community to outline how the House of Representatives can be more open and accountable, of which an enduring touchstone is the Open House Project Report, issued in May 2007. It's recommendation remain relevant today:

• Legislation Database—publish legislative data in structured formats
• Preserving Congressional Information—protect congressional information through archiving and distribution
• Congressional Committees—recognize committees as a public resource by making committee information available online
• Congressional Research Service—share non-partisan research beyond Congress
• Member Web-Use Restrictions—permit members to take full advantage of internet resources
• Citizen Journalism Access—grant House access to non-traditional journalists
• The Office of the Clerk of the House—serve as a source for digital disclosure information
• The Congressional Record—maintain the veracity of a historical document
• Congressional Video—create open video access to House proceedings
• Coordinating Web Standards—commit to technology reform as an administrative priority

These issues are still outstanding. We have yet to see bulk access to THOMAS or public access to CRS reports, important legislative and ethics documents are still unavailable in digital format, many committee hearings still are not online, and so on. There has been some progress, however, including a written directive from the House leadership pledging to do more and an important Committee on House Administration hearing that hints at progress-to-come. But there is a need for more, which is being recognized by the event's hosts.

If you have not RSVP'd, there's still time. We hope that this will be the kick-off to a much broader discussion. If you want to get a head start, join in the conversation on our Open House Project listserv.

A year ago today, Congress' Joint Committee on Printing directed that three sets of vital legislative and legal documents be published online "as quickly as possible." We've reviewed how well that order was implemented, and the results are not encouraging. Of the three documents, there's only apparent progress on one.

The vital documents are the Constitution Annotated, the Congressional Record, and the Statutes at Large. The Government Printing Office is responsible for publishing them, and shares that responsibility to a certain extent with the Library of Congress and its subsidiary agencies, the Congressional Research Service and the Law Library of Congress. These agencies are custodians of America's heritage, and have an important obligation to make it available to every citizen. Here's how they've performed.

The Constitution Annotated

The Constitution Annotated (or CONAN) is a constantly-updated legal treatise that explains how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution. It's available to the public online from GPO, but in a cramped, out-of-date, technologically unsophisticated format. Members of the public have been asking for access to a better version for years.

JCP's instructions to GPO are simple and straightforward:

To make the online version of CONAN as useful as possible to Congress and the public, it is time to put the updates online as soon as they are prepared, rather than waiting to coincide with the two-year print cycle. The Joint Committee on Printing is authorizing you to work with the Library of Congress to update the online edition as frequently as possible, and to create new and improved functions on the CONAN site. The Congress and the public should find this site accessible and user-friendly.

What's happened since then? As far as is visible to the public, nothing. The most recent GPO-published  publicly-available complete version of CONAN dates back to 2002, and no updates have been published online since 2010. The webpage is hard to find, and only Congress has access to the latest version on its internal network, as provided by the document's author, the Congressional Research Service. GPO should save itself the trouble and share with the public what's already available on Congress' intranet.

The Congressional Record

The Congressional Record is the official record of congressional proceedings and debates. GPO has published an online version of the Record dating back to 1994, and the document was first published in its current format in 1873. The Library of Congress has published online earlier recordings of congressional proceedings and debates dating back from the founding of the country until 1873.

The Joint Committee on Printing authorized a collaboration between the GPO and the Library of Congress to digitize volumes of the Congressional Record from 1873 to 1998, which would fill in the missing gaps and provide a complete record of Congressional activity on the internet. JCP directed the online publication of "digital files with search functions, content management capabilities, and digital authentication."

Looking at GPO's website, the collection only dates back to 1994. THOMAS, however, appears to contain records going back to 1989.

There's more than a 100 year gap in the online records of congressional proceedings and debates, a majority of which is within living memory and has repercussions to this day. There's no evidence that any substantive work has been done on this in the last year.

Statutes at Large

The Statutes at Large is the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by Congress. It was first published by a private company in 1845, but responsibility for publication was transferred to GPO in 1874, with administrative responsibility shifting in 1950 and again in 1985. Like the Congressional Record, the Library of Congress has published online historic statutes at large covering the years 1789 to 1873. THOMAS also has long made it possible to browse (but not search) copies of the Statutes at Large from 1973 to present.

The JCP instructed GPO to work with the Law Library of Congress "to create digitized volumes of the Statutes at Large and to develop robust searching and content management tools." In essence, their role is to fill in the gaps. JCP further instructed that "once the content has been prepared, the Statutes at Large will be published online by GPO, and the Library of Congress will use their GPO content in its public database of legislative information known as 'THOMAS.'"

Unlike with the other two publications, there is tangible evidence of progress. GPO has now publishing a digitized version that covers from 1951-2002, which is a significant undertaking. However, the documents have not been integrated into THOMAS, and are still somewhat difficult to use because of their large size. Moreover, GPO published another set of digitized documents, from 2003 to 2007, that are kept in a separate location on GPO's website and stored at a much greater level of granularity.

This project is only partially complete, with a sizable gap in the public record from 1874 to 1951. Moreover, the documents haven't been integrated into THOMAS.

GPO Statement

I asked GPO to comment on their ongoing efforts to comply with the Joint Committee on Printing's letter. Here is their response:

GPO and the Library of Congress have worked together to digitize the U.S. Statutes at Large (content covers volumes 65-116, 1951-2002) and make them available through GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.fdsys.gov).

GPO and the Library of Congress are collaborating on a project to digitize the print bound Congressional Record dating back to 1873. GPO first put the daily Congressional Record online in 1994, and digital versions of the bound Congressional Record from 1998-2002 are currently available on FDsys. GPO is working with CRS on the dynamic version of CONAN.

Conclusion

I would like to call this a work in progress, but there doesn't appear to have been much progress. GPO hasn't provided an explanation for the delay, a timeline for completion, or a plan to get things on track. I know that GPO and its legislative branch colleagues can act with greater speed than we've seen thus far.

I am concerned by the apparent failure to think of how the public will find and use this information. Why aren't all the existing data sets integrated into THOMAS, where people will look for them? Why isn't the data available in bulk, so that developers can build tools to share the information more widely? Why aren't members of the public involved in the design and specifications of these sites, to make sure their needs are addressed?

The JCP described these documents are "essential to understanding our laws and legislative history" and proclaimed that "they should all be readily available online in electronic format." It is long past time to make this happen. The public deserves an explanation of what's gone wrong and when to expect results.

Update: I want to add that none of this should be construed as a commentary on what GPO, LOC, or other agency funding levels should be. Generally speaking, funding cuts would make it less likely that these important initiatives will come to fruition. Instead, I would urge Congress to more closely scrutinize compliance with its directives, and encourage agencies to be more open about their progress and the challenges they face. With respect to funding, it may be that digitization and online publication will lead to significant savings -- especially in terms of the current need to print many copies of these documents as well as the cost to government of paying private vendors to access ostensibly public documents -- but my main point is that the public has a right to this information.

(One more thing -- you may find that some of the links to documents stored on GPO's website, FDsys, don't always work. I don't know why that is, but they often time out for me, too.)

Roll Call's Jonathan Easley has a well-crafted article recounting ongoing efforts to make CRS reports publicly available, especially as the Library of Congress looks for a new head for the research service. Here's how it starts:

Government transparency advocates are pressing for the next head of the Congressional Research Service to make its reports public. As the government-run policy research agency searches for a new director, a coalition of 38 groups has sent a letter to the Library of Congress urging it to pick someone who will make CRS reports available to the public for free. Advocates have long sought to free the reports, written by the agency for Members of Congress. Many are available already from third-party sources, some of which charge for access. CQ Roll Call, which publishes Roll Call, is among the companies that sells CRS reports. “The public needs access to these non-confidential CRS reports in order to discharge their civic duties,” the groups wrote. “American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund CRS ... but while the reports are non-classified and play a critical role in our legislative process, they have never been made available in a consistent and official way to members of the public.”

For the rest of the story, go here ($).

Want to be the next Director of the Congressional Research Service? This past Monday, the Library of Congress posted a job announcement.

The duties are deceptively simple:

The Director of CRS leads the Service in the research and analysis that supports congressional deliberations on the issues facing the nation. The Director works under the general direction of the Librarian of Congress, reporting on the provision of congressional services and other operational matters, consulting with him on major policy issues, and keeping him informed of significant developments affecting the Service and the Library of Congress.

It's up to the Librarian of Congress to appoint the Director, after consulting with the Joint Committee on the Library. For a taste of the incoming director's challenges, watch this discussion on the future of CRS, hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency in May.

A coalition of organizations (including Sunlight) wrote to the Librarian in February to "ask you to appoint a Director of CRS who will help advance the goal of online free public access to CRS reports." It's worth reading the letter in full.

As I outlined earlier this year, it was the last director, and not federal law, that has worked to keep these reports from the public. It's time to restore the public's access to CRS reports, and the best way to start is with a new director committed to meeting the needs of Members of Congress and those who elect them.

Letter to Billington on Public Access to CRS Report

Later today the House of Representatives will consider the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for 2012, which if enacted would provide funds for legislative branch operations for the fiscal year starting on October 1st. Several of the 16 amendments expected to be considered during today's hour-long debate have strong transparency implications, as well as one that is not expected to be considered but is worthy of congressional action.

Make CRS Reports Publicly Available

This amendment, offered by Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), would require 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. The amendment unfortunately will not be considered because of House Rules, but it is noteworthy that it was introduced; the amendment would make many CRS products available to the public through Member and committee websites. These invaluable reports help explain policymaking in easy-to-understand terms, and there's no good reason why they aren't already made available to the public.

We and many other organizations have repeatedly called for easy public access to these reports. There have been public discussions on this topic. Bills have been introduced in Congress again and again. (Rep. Quigley and Sen. Lieberman have been particular leaders on this issue.) It's long past time for Congress to make CRS Reports available to the public.

The House Should Defeat The Attempt to Reduce OCE Funding by 40%

Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) is at it again with an attempt to defund the Office of Congressional Ethics, the House's independent ethics watchdog, perhaps because the office investigated him for questionable activity. In 2010, Watt withdrew an amendment that may have adversely affected corporations that just held a fundraiser for him two days prior to a vote, triggering an investigation. (Watt was ultimately held blameless by the often embattled and deeply conflicted House Ethics Committee -- which is different than the independent OCE.)

Watt's amendment would reduce OCE funding by 40%, which is a $620,000 reduction. Not only do we disagree with the cut, in December we called for OCE's (puny) funding to be doubled this Congress and its powers strengthened. Noted congressional scholar Norm Ornstein just published an editorial in Roll Call that urged OCE be strengthened. Now is not the time to back away from the ethics process. This amendment, which is second in line for consideration, should be defeated.

Revive the Office of Technology Assessment

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) would revive the Office of Technology Assessment by providing $2.5m for its operations in his amendment. This is a smart move. The OTA was a legislative support agency that provided Congress with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. After nearly 25 years of service, it was defunded in 1995 as part of a spasm of cost-cutting, which in OTA's case was overzealous. Technology is at the heart of our economy, and Congress needs smart advice from experts now more than ever. This amendment, which the 12th in line for consideration, should be adopted.

Don't Further Reduce GPO's Budget

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) has offered an amendment that would further reduce the Government Printing Office's budget by $5m. As the report accompanying the bill notes, the amount appropriated to GPO in the legislation is "$22,067,324, or 16.3% below the fiscal year 2011 level and $35,474,000 below the budget request." Considering GPO's key role in making information available to the public, and how drastically its budget is already being cut, this further reduction appears unwarranted. GAO is already set to look into restructuring GPO, per the Committee Report, so these additional cuts are likely premature. Rep. Stutzman's amendment will be considered eighth, and should be defeated.

Other Amendments

There are a number of other noteworthy amendments, but there's two worth highlighting. First, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) would prohibit Members of Congress from using House funds to purchase web ads that advertise Member or Committee websites. We have not yet formulated an opinion on this amendment, but Rep. Flake deserves commendation for continuing to think about the intersection of ethics, money, and new media. His amendment will be considered 11th.

Second, Rep. Erik Paulson (R-Minn.), along with several others, has introduced two amendments that would require legislation and the Congressional Record be distributed to congressional offices electronically and not in printed form, unless requested by the office. While we do not have a recommendation as to passage or defeat, it is great to see thoughtful consideration of how to move the House further into the electronic age. This may be a cost-savings measure, but it also would further the House's embrace of electronic media and would prompt deliberations on how to improve how electronic information is distributed -- both inside Congress and to the public. The Committee on House Administration recently held a hearing on modernizing information delivery in the House.