Congress routinely requires federal agencies to report back on their activities, but the legislative branch struggles with tracking and sharing those reports. After a decade long effort, in late 2022 Congress enacted the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. This law requires many agencies to provide a duplicate copy of the reports they submit to Congress to the Government Publishing Office, which maintains a central repository and makes the reports available to legislators and the public.

The legislation is a significant accomplishment for government transparency as the public would no longer need to file a FOIA request for these documents. It also is a significant accomplish for government accountability and efficiency, as all congressional offices would be able to obtain agency reports to Congress. In the past, the reports might easily be lost or not available to all.

Unfortunately, execution of the law faces significant technical challenges.

First, there is no canonical list of all reports due to Congress. The Clerk of the House of Representatives maintains a list, updated annually, of all reports due to Congress pursuant to House Rule II. Unfortunately, the Clerk interprets the cataloging requirement as applying only to reports the law requires be sent to the House or Senate, and not its committees or subcommittees. Accordingly, the catalog of mandated reports is incomplete, as many thousands of reports are directed to be sent to committees and thus do not show up on the Clerk’s list.

Many executive branch agencies maintain lists of the reports they believe they must provide to Congress. Unfortunately, there is no central repository of those reports, and the lists maintained by the agencies are not publicly available. As of FY 2026, agencies do provide a list of reports they believe are outdated or duplicative pursuant to the Eliminate Useless Reports Act of 2024, but publication of the duplicative and unnecessary reports in the agency’s Congressional Budget Justification does not solve the underlying problem.

Second, information about the reports are not available as structured data. The partial list, generated by the Clerk of the House (see example here), is published as a PDF. A file in PDF format is very difficult for a computer to read. In addition, the reports do not have a unique identifier — a social security number that only refers to a specific report. As a result, it would be challenging for GPO to look at the report they’ve received from an agency and to identify the same report from the list produced by the Clerk.

Third, there may be errors in the list produced by the Clerk or in the letter accompanying the document received by GPO. This makes it challenging to use citations to the law requiring the report be provided to Congress as a mechanism to determine a report has been provide.

The American Governance Institute has advocated for fixes to the ACMRA and Clerk’s report to address these issues. Fixes include expanding the Clerk’s report to include all reports due to Congress, requiring the Clerk’s report to be published as structured data and with unique identifiers for each report, and having GPO engage in quality assure to determine that they’ve received all the reports due to them.

Recently, however, we decided to try an additional approach: using technology to identify reports due to Congress and whether they have been received. To that end, we brought on government technology expert Dave Zvenyach to experiment with methods for sorting out the report collection and identifying what’s missing. Zvenyach presented preliminary findings of the project at the Congressional Data Task Force meeting in June, and he and Daniel had a more in-depth conversation about it recently that can be viewed below.

Among Dave’s findings:

• It is technologically possible to create a crosswalk between the reports identified in the Clerk’s report and those received by GPO.
• Of the nearly 3,300 mandated reports, GPO has received less than 1/3, or approximately 1,060 filings.
• GPO has received reports from agencies that are not in the Clerk’s list, approximately 400 reports so far.

Watch the video below, and watch his slides here.