Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post.

The Congressional Management Foundation announced its Golden Mouse Awards for the 112th Congress on October 23. The CMF began grading congressional websites in 2001 and announces the Golden Mouse Awards biannually to honor the best. Earlier this year, we conducted an investigation evaluating congressional committee websites.

Congressional websites have improved significantly since 2009, according to the  report. The most common grade jumped from an F up to a B between the 111th and 112th congresses. However, there is still room to grow in some significant areas. According to the report, many member websites "lack basic educational and transparency features." Alternatively, while members have been quick to utilize social media tools, committees have been slower to follow suit.

The CMF found that, when searching for information on their policy positions or votes, constituents look first at their member's websites. Despite this fact, many members have websites that do not provide useful information in a transparent way. For example, more than 40% of members do not post information about their votes, sponsored, or cosponsored bills. Additionally, 67% of member websites do not provide clear information directing constituents how to contact their member with casework requests.

In contrast,  most committees provide information expected by interested users in clear and readable formats. For instance, 90% of committees provide an archive of information on their hearings, and 78% have a video webcast feature. Committee websites lacked transparency in one major area- only 16% post information on individual legislators committee votes.

When it comes to social media adoption rates, the tables are somewhat turned. Individual members have taken to social media with gusto over the past two years, while committees are trailing behind. In 2009 only 21% of member websites linked to Facebook; that number is now 81%. Meanwhile, 71% of members link to a Twitter page and CMF found that 65% actively used the platform. Committees have been slower to adopt social media, with only 40% linking to Facebook and just 31% actively using Twitter.

During our own investigation, we found that, although there is wide variation in the quality of committee sites, there are some identifiable trends.

On the whole, House committee websites were superior to Senate sites. However, there was parity in certain areas. Both chambers lagged in making legislation, amendments, and markups available on their sites. Additionally, only four committees provided forms for whistleblowers to report issues. Like CMF, we found that committee sites had been slow to adopt social media, with the House being more advanced than the Senate. On the positive side,  every committee made it possible to view hearings online, although not all provided live webcasts.

The raw data from the investigation can be accessed here.

By policy interns Jacob Hutt and Eric Dunn

This is the third in a series of blog posts about congressional committee websites. For an overview of committee websites, see our first and second posts.

Social media and news releases are powerful examples of how technology can link citizens and elected officials. Congressional committees should publish informative content on their websites, but they should also make this content clear and accessible so that people can understand it. In this post, we take a look at how congressional committees make their websites work for constituents by releasing publications, reaching out to whistleblowers, and taking advantage of social media.

Publications

We looked at committee websites to see if they displayed reports from the committee, Congressional Research Service reports on committee-related material, the rules of the committee, or a comprehensive committee oversight plan.

The House Budget Committee was an exemplar of what we hoped to find.  The website featured reports on its Laws and Rules page, information about how the federal budget process works, and a glossary of budget terms provided by the GAO. These are excellent tools that highlight how access to these types of publications can make committee websites more effective.

Another committee that stood out was the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, which included fact sheets on pending legislation in the committee. Notably absent from almost every other committee website, fact sheets are a great resource for constituents looking for a way to digest legislation. Unfortunately, generally speaking, non-committee legislative publications (CRS reports, memoranda, GAO reports, etc.) are difficult to find on committee websites.

The Best: House Committee on the Budget and House Committee on Education & the Workforce

Whistleblowers

Congressional committees should give constituents the opportunity to participate in government and provide a secure way for whistleblowers to report fraud and abuse. Only four committees offer forms for whistleblowers to report waste, fraud and abuse on their websites: the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Committee on Financial Services, the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. All four forms remind whistleblowers that their information will be kept in confidence.

Social Media

New media is a crucial way for representatives to keep the public quickly informed and fully engaged. We traced six different types of media on committee websites: a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a photo gallery, a podcast link, and an RSS feed/email list.

The House Armed Services Committee is one example of social media done well. Links to the committee’s Twitter and Facebook pages appear at the top of their website. A member of the public tuned into their Twitter feed or Facebook page would have easy access to all types of information. The pages are updated every few hours with legislative activity, links to live streams of hearings, and other committee news.

The House Ways and Means Committee also stood out for its unique use of media - including a podcast and Youtube channel - to connect constituents with the work it is doing.

Other websites haven’t quite found their way into the 21st century. The Senate Armed Services website is a prime example of a website that serves an important government function but makes it difficult for constituents to find social media pages.

The Best: House Armed Services Committee

Committees By the Numbers

• 14 of 21 House committees have a Facebook page, compared to just 2 of 20 Senate committees.
• 18  House committees have a Twitter feed; just 2 Senate committees have one.
• 5 House committee websites have a regularly updated blog. The Senate has none.
• Just 4 committees make documents available in non-PDF formats.
• Only 9 House committee pages featured links to a comprehensive oversight plan (as required by the rules).

By policy interns Jacob Hutt and Eric Dunn

This is the second in a series of blog posts about congressional committee websites. You can see our first post here and our final post here.

In our last post, we reviewed how well committees made their inner workings publicly available. In this post, we look at their pages for hearings, subcommittees, legislation, and ethics disclosure.

Legislation and Markups

It is crucial that bill markups and draft legislation be available online prior to consideration. Committee pages on legislation and markups should include the legislation that was referred to the committee, drafts of legislation, the chairman’s mark, amendments, a summary of amendments, any votes on amendments, and the committee report on the legislation. In general, both House and Senate committees could do a much better job of this.

There were highlights, however: the House Rules Committee features an “Active Bills” page that shows a real-time list of actions taken on a specific pieces of legislation, including the time the bill will reach the floor. The House Natural Resources Committee provides a page for every piece of legislation with a summary, a link to the full text and markup progress, and relevant hearings on the legislation. And the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources has individual pages for significant legislation passed, such as the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009. But these were exceptions to the rule. Most committees did not make this information available.

The Best: the House Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

Hearings

On hearing pages, we expected live broadcasts of the hearings, indications of the type of hearing taking place, a list of witnesses, witness testimony, documents submitted to the committee, and a transcript of the hearing. We were pleased to see that all committees make it possible to view hearings online. However, we did not evaluate the extent to which live hearings are made available (all hearings available vs. a few  hearings available), which has been a problem for some committees, such as the House Appropriations Committee.

That said, there were clear differences among committees: some advertised their hearings very well (the House Natural Resources Committee); some were a bit difficult to navigate once on the hearings page (the House Judiciary Committee); and some included information that helped users orient themselves on the issues of a specific hearing (the House Energy & Commerce Committee website has background memos on each of the hearing pages).

The Best: The House Energy & Commerce Committee

Subcommittees

Although certain committees do their work as a full committee, most hold hearings and debate legislation in subcommittees. We listed many standards for subcommittee pages, suggesting that they should offer the same content as a normal committee page: links to live hearings, copies of witness testimony, legislation the subcommittee was considering, minority leadership information, and more.

We found the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee to be a perfect model for subcommittee pages. They include relevant legislation, resources for veterans, membership information, and jurisdiction. Most of the subcommittee coverage was similar to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s page, which meets many but not all of the recommendations we made for subcommittee pages. By contrast, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its subcommittee page had almost no substantive information on their subcommittees.

The Best: The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee

Ethics Disclosure

One of the hallmarks of transparency is ethics disclosure, whether it is members disclosing their personal incomes or committees disclosing earmark requests by certain members. This was rarely featured on committee websites. We found two exceptions: the Senate Appropriations Committee, which has personal financial disclosure records available for every member of the committee next to their name; and the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, which identifies specific earmarks that each committee member has requested. (The committee has not updated this information since the House of Representatives imposed a moratorium on earmarks, even though earmarks have continued in a different guise.)

In addition to these committee-specific disclosure efforts, the House Committee on Administration posts monthly financial reports that committees are required to file with the House Committee on Administration. Beyond these required reports, committees should post members’ financial records, as the Senate Appropriations committee has done.

The Best: Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee

Many committees, particularly in the Senate, have work to do in enhancing their content, specifically in the legislative area. More websites need comprehensive legislative webpages where citizens can view the changes made to a bill before it becomes a law. While committees are making good progress on these websites, we hope that as they continue to publish substantive material onto the web, they will remember the need for both accessibility and ease-of-use in publishing this material.

By policy interns Eric Dunn and Jacob Hutt

This is the first in a series of blog posts about congressional committee websites. Follow these links for the second and final blogposts.

Congressional committee websites are Congress’s front door. It’s in committees where the majority of legislative work is done, and it’s where the public can have the greatest impact on legislation. Recently, we went through all forty-five House, Senate, and Joint Committee websites and evaluated them based on a transparency checklist made by Sunlight in 2010. In this first of a series of blog posts, we reveal general trends from our evaluation and highlight the websites that stood out, the ones that need some work, and a few that were just awful.

General Trends

Overall, House committee websites were better than Senate ones. Even between committees with the same jurisdiction (we’re looking at you, House Armed Services and Senate Armed Services) the quality of websites varied widely.

The House Armed Services Committee website:

vs.

The Senate Armed Services Committee website:

Websites often focus on form over function. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee boasts a website that looks great but lacks crucial features, such as subcommittee pages and social media tools. Committees with a direct constituency (Veterans Affairs, for example) were more likely to be functional than member-focused committees (such as Senate Rules).

Lastly, almost all congressional websites (with a few notable exceptions we’ll explore later) do not offer clear protections for whistleblowers or meet our basic criteria for disclosure.

The Stand-outs

Two committee websites stood out as extremely impressive. The first, the House Committee on Natural Resources, met 43 of our 60 recommendations and its pages on legislation and subcommittees should serve as a model for other committee websites. Similarly, the House Armed Services Committee website not only met most of our criteria but was also one of the few committees to have a regularly updated blog.

Needs some work

Many committee websites are good, but not great. The Senate Committee on Armed Services website provides some informative content, but the design looks like a high school project and it has no connection to social media. The Senate Finance Committee website has useful documents tucked away or missing, and many of those documents that are present are outdated. Many of the websites -- the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, for example -- do not have pages for legislation that include important information like the chairman’s mark or proposed amendments.

Just plain awful:

A few websites are painful. The Senate Ethics Committee is rough on the eyes and difficult to navigate. The websites for the Joint Committee on Printing and the Joint Committee on the Library are by far the worst of them all - they have not been updated in years. Half of the committee members pictured on these websites are no longer in office.

The Joint Committee on Printing's website:

Here are our evaluation spreadsheets for all 45 committee websites:

You can also see the Senate, House, and Joint committee website evaluations on our Tracking Committee Website Transparency wiki page.

In our next two posts, we’ll look at what’s on committee websites and how well committees reach out to constituents.

[Update: We have broadened the mark-up category to include any page referring to markups or legislation and hearings.]

Yesterday the government’s Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS) came online. This is something we’ve been looking forward to for a while. It’s easy to find horror stories about the mismanagement of contracts; this isn’t surprising when you consider the disorganized constellation of contractor oversight databases that exists, many of which aren’t open to the public. Getting FAPIIS online should be a step toward fixing that problem. Yesterday government took that step.

POGO has some thoughts about it that are certainly worth your time. But we can’t help chiming in as well. In short: this site is terrible. As one colleague said, “This might be the worst website I’ve ever seen.”

This is at least debatable. Contracting databases are part of the world of procurement, procurement is heavily influenced by the Defense Department, and DoD has a proud heritage of producing websites so ugly that they make you want to claw out your eyes. So FAPIIS has company. But if this was just a question of aesthetics, we wouldn’t be complaining.

Assuming you’re using one of the few web browsers in which the site works at all (Chrome and Safari users are out of luck), the experience is off-putting from the start, as users are warned that their use of the site may be monitored, surveilled, or otherwise spied upon (you don’t necessarily surrender your right to speak privately to your priest by using the website, though—thanks for clearing that up, guys!). Perhaps this is why their (arguably superfluous) SSL certificate is utterly broken. But let’s click past the security warnings and proceed.

Here’s the next screen. It contains a captcha.

Let’s be clear: the use of a captcha to gate government data is outrageous. Government should be making its data more accessible and more machine-readable. Captchas are designed to interfere with automated tools that facilitate malicious acts. But downloading government data is decidedly not a malicious act. Why are we trying to limit machines’ ability to use this data?

But our irritation with the captcha is softened a bit by how laughably inept its implementation is. It’s made of black and white text, unrotated, unskewed, superimposed on the same black and white grid every time. Here’s a stab at how you’d beat it:

1. Subtract grid
2. Flip every white pixel that’s bordered by 2 or more black pixels to black
3. Identify columns of all-white pixels and slice the image by them
4. Crop the resulting slices, then recombine
5. OCR

You could probably get this done using a stock PHP distribution in about an afternoon. But you don’t need to, because even this pathetic level of security isn’t properly implemented! Instead the human-readable text is sent to the client as a SHA1 hash in a hidden field. That hash is compared to the hash of what the user enters for the captcha code. So a scraper can just ignore the captcha and resend a solved hash for every request — it’ll work just fine¹. They didn’t even salt the hash. Whoever wrote this has absolutely no idea how to implement a secure system.

After the captcha, things start to get really weird, with radio buttons with onclick handlers being used as hyperlinks. It’s unclear to me whether the programmers responsible for this interface had ever actually used the web or simply had it described to them. Either way, whoever built this should be embarrassed. Whoever managed the project should be embarrassed. Whoever signed off on delivery should be embarrassed! But we haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet.

That’s because while all of the above will be embarrassing to any developer who takes pride in his or her craft, the quality of a government website is ultimately less important than the data it exposes. And there is no FAPIIS data in FAPIIS. Not yet, anyway. Such data exists, mind you. But the decision was made not to include any historical data when FAPIIS went public. Presumably the contractors who did a bad job, and who were reported for doing so, are concerned that people might look at those reports and get the impression that, uh, they did a bad job. Others may be concerned that the database could cast them in a bad light and raise uncomfortable questions. That government caved in to the demands of these vendors — vendors who are supposed to be serving government! — can only be described as an act of craven capitulation. We’ve FOIAed for this data, and if we’re lucky, perhaps we’ll even get it. But it ought to be online right now.

As a matter of principle, it’s good to see government opening closed databases, and Congress deserves credit for deciding to open this one. But what has followed that decision deserves only whatever the smallest quantity of plaudits is that’s still distinguishable from zero. I hope that the site removes the captcha, offers bulk downloads, and fills up with useful, unsanitized data. But whoever built this travesty deserves to have an entry in FAPIIS of their own.

1: You do need to update the JSESSIONID cookie and get a fresh value for the org.apache.struts.taglib.html.TOKEN hidden variable, but this is easy enough to do.

Cross-posted from the Sunlight Labs blog