Big Picture
1/ There’s big gaps in the data story
2/ Even when there’s data, it may not tell the whole story
- Info about Congress isn’t entire reliable, even when it is official, e.g., the Congressional Record (“revise and extend”)
- Congress historically is a paper-based institution, driven by people with agendas, and it has inconsistent archival practices, e.g. GPO established in 1860, National Archives created in 1934
- Its institutions are built to solve a particular problem, not work for all time. Plus there’s a lot of turf wars, e.g., the former THOMAS.gov
- Analyses, even by experts, can be unreliable because of the source data or unexpected actions. See, e.g. CRS report on the number of staff in an office (done by counting phone numbers) or the various supplementals
3/ The people who dogfood the data, such as Josh Tauberer at GovTrack, Derek Willis formerly of ProPublica, and OpenSecrets, are often forced to build additional reliability and usability into the data than that available from official sources.
4/ This presentation is idiosyncratic and focuses on particular use cases. Major topics include:
- Federal spending information
- Oversight and accountability
- Legislation
- Congressional committees
- Information about Congress
- Money in politics and ethics
- Other interesting and important stuff