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.

Earlier this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that lawmaker office expenses would be placed online at the earliest possible time. According to House Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard, that earliest date will likely be August 31. Beard, according to the Wall Street Journal, also stated intentions to make the disclosure more accessible in the future, "Electronic versions of the ink-and-paper reports will initially be posted in PDF format. The House "is examining ways" to enhance the ability to search the documents when it rolls out a new internal financial-processing system during the 112th Congress."

While this policy applies only to the House, the Senate may be pushed into taking action as well. The Journal is also reporting that Sen. Tom Coburn will introduce a bill to require the online disclosure of Senate office expenses. Majority Leader Harry Reid's office states that they will look at the issue:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) said Wednesday he would introduce a bill requiring the expense records be posted online in the Senate, as well. Such disclosures are "something that we will take a look at," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.).

What would happen here in the States if congressmen were revealed to have used their office allowances (Member's Representational Allowance) on XXX-rated tapes, digging a moat around their McMansion, or paying down a mortgage that had already been paid off? It wouldn't be too different from how the British are reacting right now. Members of Parliament (MPs) have been discovered using their personal allowances on the above mentioned items and more (in Britain, however, they do not have McMansions, they actually have castles) and the people are wicked angry. The scandal has already claimed the Speaker of the House of Commons and almost a dozen MPs, who have promised not to run for office again.

The Wikipedia page on the MP expense scandal provides a fairly detailed primer to introduce yourself to the peculiar purchasing peccadillos of Members of Parliament. In short, this all began when an intrepid indepedent journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense account information. Parliament refused and filed numerous appeals, losing each time. Eventually, Parliament stated that they would release the expense information to the full public in July of 2009, but they would redact certain information -- that information turned out to be the juiciest stuff. Before that month could come (we are still in May), the Daily Telegraph obtained a full, unredacted list of MP expenses and began running stories exposing the various outrages that MPs expensed on the government dime. And it has all tumbled out of control from there.

In some ways, we've seen similar scandals here in the United States. In the early 1990s, there were two concurrent scandals related to the House Bank and the House Post Office. The House banking scandal involved lawmakers -- practically every single one of them -- kiting checks and going months with huge overdrafts on their accounts. The House Post Office scandal saw lawmakers purchasing stamps with their Member's Representational Allowance (MRA) and then trading them back to the Post Office for cash. The House banking scandal led to the conviction of four former lawmakers and a short scolding of 22 lawmakers by the House Ethics Committee. The House Post Office scandal led to the conviction of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, one of the last of the congressional bulls, for laundering money through stamps, hiring "ghost" employees, and using MRA funds for personal uses.

Rostenkowski may be the most famous of House lawmakers to be taken down, like the MP expense scandal, by misuse of office funds, but he is certainly not the only one. In the 1970s, Rep. Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Adminsitration Committee, was felled after it was revealed that he kept his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on his congressional payroll as a secretary despite, in her own words, that, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone!" During the Hays scandal coverage, a similar situation was uncovered with Rep. John Young .

Whether it is the MP scandal, Rostenkowski, or Hays, it is obvious the one thing that abets these kinds of abuses is a serious lack of transparency. Had all of these expense funds and allowances been accessible to the public any person would reason that they could not easily get away with abuse or misuse of the funds. Preempting actions by making the item of potential abuse transparent prevents the actions from being made.

Despite this obvious case for transparency in office funds, congressional "Statements of Expenditures" (how the MRA is spent by each individual office) are still no where to be found on the Internet. They are printed up in a series of books (really, a lot of books) and never placed near a computer, scanner, or anything that would allow you to see them, save a trip to the basement of the Longworth House Office Building.

Last year, Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg endorsed the idea of online disclosure for the "Statements of Expenditures" writing, "[W]e would like to see the “Statements of Expenditures” required by law to be made public by the House and Senate to be put online by each of the legislative bodies. ... Failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports."

It should go without saying that at Sunlight, we believe that if Congress is required to make a document or report public, it can only satisfy that mandate by putting the information online in a searchable format.  That's why we would like to see the "Statements of Expenditures" required by law to be made public by the House and Senate to be put online by each of the legislative bodies. Only then will citizens  have access to a full and detailed accounting of how Members spend the taxpayer funds that they receive to run their offices.

These behemoth reports, which weigh in at around four pounds, are published quarterly by the House and semi-annually by the Senate. They are available, "while supplies last," at the House and Senate document rooms and they can be "viewed" at Federal Depository Libraries.  But they are virtually inaccessible to a citizen wondering what her representative pays members of his staff or whether the congressman is purchasing flat screen TVs, magazine subscriptions or potted plants for the office. At a time when most American families and businesses are tightening their belts, citizens should be able to assess for themselves whether their representatives in Congress are spending taxpayer funds wisely.

Failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports.  As Sunlight advocates in our Transparency in Government Act, a transparent 111th Congress will open up its books for review by the public, and will find that this painless endeavor helps to begin to restore the public's trust in the accountability of the institution.