The Government Publishing Office would be required to make Congressional Research Service reports publicly accessible over the internet, under legislation reintroduced last week by Reps. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., and Mike Quigley, D-Ill.
The CRS, a division of the Library of Congress, is known as Congress’ in-house “think tank.” House offices and committees historically have been free to publish CRS reports on their own websites for constituents to view and some third parties aggregate CRS data on websites like everyCRSreport.com.
But while taxpayers spend more than $100 million annually to fund CRS, timely access to these important documents is usually reserved to Washington insiders. There exists no official, aggregated source for taxpayers to access the CRS’ valuable and informative work.
R Street Vice President for Kevin Kosar, himself a veteran CRS analyst, testified recently before the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, where he presented the panel with a letter signed by 25 former CRS employees with more than 570 combined years of service who all support an open public database of nonconfidential CRS reports.
There is strong precedent for public access to legislative support agency documents. In his subcommittee testimony, Kevin noted the Government Accountability Office, Congressional Budget Office and the Law Library of Congress all make their reports public, as do the 85 percent of G-20 countries whose parliaments have subject-matter experts.
Proposals like the Lance-Quigley bill would place publishing responsibilities with another entity, to ameliorate CRS concerns about the service having to publish the reports itself. Briefings and confidential memoranda would not be disclosed and data issued to the public through a searchable, aggregated database would only include nonconfidential information.
As Kevin noted in his testimony, the public deserves to be on equal footing with lobbyists and the Hill.
