There’s big news from today’s Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force meeting. The United States Senate announced it would begin publishing text and summary information for Senate legislation, going back to the 113th Congress, in bulk XML. It would join the House of Representatives, which already does this. Both chambers also expect to have bill status information available online in XML format as well, but a little later on in the year.

This move goes a long way to meet the request made by a coalition of transparency organizations, which asked for legislative information be made available online, in bulk, in machine-processable formats. These changes, once implemented, will hopefully put an end to screen scraping and empower users to build impressive tools with authoritative legislative data. A meeting to spec out publication methods will be hosted by the Task Force in late January/early February.

The Senate should be commended for making the leap into the 21st century with respect to providing the American people with crucial legislative information. We will watch closely to see how this is implemented and hope to work with the Senate as it moves forward.

In addition, the Clerk of the House announced significant new information will soon be published online in machine-processable formats. This includes data on nominees, election statistics, and members (such as committee assignments, bioguide IDs, start date, preferred name, etc.) Separately, House Live has been upgraded so that all video is now in H.264 format. The Clerk’s website is also undergoing a redesign.

The Office of Law Revision Counsel, which publishes the US Code, has further upgraded its website to allow pinpoint citations for the US Code. Users can drill down to the subclause level simply by typing the information into their search engine. This is incredibly handy.

The Library of Congress is continuing to upgrade Congress.gov and copying all content over from THOMAS. Information expected to be available on Congress.gov in early 2015 information includes the Federalist papers and video streams for committees. Some work remains to be done, including moving over bill information from the late 80s to early 90s, senate executive branch communications, and the appropriations’ citation tables. All materials are not expected to be ported over to Congress.gov until after the close of FY 2015 (which is October 1.)

The Amendment Impact Program, which shows how a bill would amend the law and an amendment would affect a bill, is still under construction. The next step to bringing this program online is to embed the process into the workflow for the House Rules Committee to make sure it works properly. The FY 2015 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill, which just was enacted into law as part of the CRomnibus, provides a steady source of funding for these efforts.

All in all, these are wonderful developments. House and Senate staff, as well as those as legislative support agencies, should be commended for their hard work. We are looking forward to seeing what the new year brings.

Update: Here’s a few press releases and celebratory blogposts:

• Rep. Darrell Issa
• Rep. Steny Hoyer
• GovTrack
• Sunlight Foundation

And video from the announcement.

Mozilla is launching the new Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellowship – a 10-month program designed to find emerging technical leaders who have a passion for Internet policy and advocacy. They’re in the midst of recruiting qualified applicants.

Here’s a bit more about the program:

• Good candidates are developers, technologists, hackers and data crunchers – policy and politics expertise not required, but we’re looking for interest in the advocacy space, in making good change happen for the Internet.
• The fellows will spend 10 months embedded in one of our host organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Open Technology Institute, and Amnesty International.
• Fellows will be immersed in projects that create better technical understanding among civil society and policy makers.
• Perhaps the most important detail: The Fellowships are paid positions.

The deadline to apply is December 31st. Interested candidates can learn more and apply through https://advocacy.mozilla.org/.

The Congressional Data Coalition is pleased to join the Free Law Founders, a nation-wide organization that shares resources and expertise around opening up laws, legislation, and the lawmaking process online.

From their website:

The Free Law Founders is a nation-wide, collaborative effort open to all people who want to improve how laws and legislation are produced and presented to citizens of American states and cities. Our goal is to modernize how democracy works in the United States from the ground up. To get there, we’re creating open source tools and open data formats government workers need to get their jobs done efficiently, effectively and accountably. And we’re building digital democracy platforms so citizens can finally access legislative information online in user-friendly, interactive formats that make sense. And we’re making all of our work available on the Internet for any community to reuse at no cost.

More information about Free Law Founders is here.

(Crossposted from R Street)

The Federation of American Scientists recently posted a copy of a report titled, “Major Disaster Declarations for Snow Assistance and Severe Winter Storms: An Overview.” The document was produced by the Congressional Research Service, an agency where I worked for a decade. The report is fascinating on a few counts.

First, it likely will come as news to much of America that the U.S. government provides funds to localities clobbered by blizzards. The Federal Emergency Management Agency administers aid for both “snow assistance” and for “severe winter storms.” What’s the difference? The report explains:

“According to FEMA, a snowstorm is an event in which a state has record or near-record snowfall in one or more counties that overwhelms the capability of state and local government to respond to the event. Severe winter storms, on the other hand, are events that occur during the winter season that include one or more of the following conditions: snow, ice, high winds, blizzard conditions, and other winter conditions that cause substantial physical damage or property loss.”

The CRS report finds that $2.7 billion in federal aid was provided over the past five years, most of it going to help cover the cost of debris removal, infrastructure repair, and, yes, snow removal. This isnot a new policy unleashed by an activist Obama Administration—in fact, it is carried out consequent to the Stafford Act (42 U.S.C. 5122), a four-decade old statute. As another CRS reportnotes, a century ago, the feds had no role in disaster response and recovery. It was purely a local matter. But, bit by bit, the responsibility for disaster response and recovery has shifted from states and localities to the feds.

This snow aid report also is noteworthy because it illustrates a basic truth that is not widely accepted: governance is incredibly complicated. Too often, one hears it said that anyone with good horse sense can stride in Congress and begin governing well. In truth, governance, particularly in the 21st century, is fantastically complex. The federal government is a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate, undertaking an incredible number of activities. To be an effective legislator or congressional staffer who can make smart policy, one needs an immense amount of schooling in the nuts-and-bolts of government works. And as this report illustrates, that is a major role of the Congressional Research Service. This report walks the reader through the basics, explaining what the policy is, what it costs, and how it is administered.

Which leads to a final observation. Nowhere else on the Internet can one find this information in one document. This report became available to the public only because FAS, a private organization, has friends on the Hill. FAS, commendably, publicly shares whatever CRS reports it can get, which is a real benefit. Currently, CRS is not allowed to share its reports with the public, and Congress itself does not post them on Congress.gov. Congress should share these reports with the public. The public would benefit from free access to these nonpartisan, objective documents. CRS reports help Members of Congress better do their jobs, and they can help the public better understand the government that is to serve them.

Something rare has occurred—a collection of reports authored by the Congressional Research Service has been published and made freely available to the public. The 400-page volume, titled, “The Evolving Congress,” and was produced in conjunction with CRS’s celebration of its 100^th anniversary this year. Congress, not CRS, published it. (Disclaimer: Before departing CRS in October, I helped edit a portion of the volume.)

The Congressional Research Service does not release its reports publicly. CRS posts its reports at CRS.gov, a website accessible only to Congress and its staff. The agency has a variety of reasons for this policy, not least that its statute does not assign it this duty. Congress, with ease, could change this policy. Indeed, it already makes publicly available the bill digests (or “summaries”) CRS produces at Congress.gov.

“The Evolving Congress” is a remarkable collection of essays that cover a broad range of topic. Readers would be advised to start from the beginning. Walter Oleszek provides a lengthy essay on how Congress has changed over the past century. Michael Koempel then assesses how the job of Congressman has evolved (or devolved depending on one’s perspective). “Over time, both Chambers developed strategies to reduce the quantity of time given over to legislative work in order to accommodate Members’ other duties,” Koempel observes.

“The Evolving Congress“’s 20 remaining essays are devoted to close-up looks at Congress (e.g., Members demography, congressional staff) and how policy gets made (e.g., the rushed establishment of DHS, the perennial extension of tax breaks). All together, the essays inform the reader how Congress, despite its evident dysfunction, does get some things done—often in creative ways.

If anything, “The Evolving Congress” provides further evidence that CRS’s reports should be released to the public. Congress and federal policy are complex, often maddeningly so. Freeing CRS’s reports would give the public something tangible in return for the $107 million it pays for CRS’s operations: an oasis of unbiased information in an Internet awash with half-truths and outright buncombe. And unlike most political science research, CRS’s work tends to be easy to read.

Hopefully, the 114^th Congress will end this policy and post CRS reports online at Congress.gov.

CRS The Evolving Congress (December 2014) by Kevin R. Kosar

Kevin R. Kosar is the Director of the Governance Project and a Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute. He worked at the Congressional Research Service from 2003-2014.

Dear Library of Congress and Government Printing Office,

For decades, you have jointly published a handy compendium that explains the U.S. Constitution as it has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. It took a couple of letters from the Senate (and repeated nudging from the public interest community—2009, 2010,2011, 2012, 2013) to move you to publish the Constitution Annotatedonline more than once a decade, but you still do not regularly publish it online in a structured-data format. Instead, the Constitution Annotated is published as a PDF, which has not been updated in 15 months.

The entire point of the document is to educate the public and Congress about the Constitution. As a technical matter, the Constitution Annotated is prepared as an XML file, published internally to congressional staff as a series of web pages, and updated regularly. You could simply make those pages available to the public and we would all be happy. Instead, the public interest community must keep pestering you, year after year.

Why do we care? Publishing the Constitution Annotated in a structured-data format means that the public can easily reuse the information so that more people can benefit from the knowledge it contains. Structured data makes it easier to embed the information in Wikipedia, or create betterwebsites on the Constitution, and so on. It also means we can do neat things with the contents, such as automatically classifying Supreme Court cases by topic simply by drawing upon the document’s structure.

Publishing the Constitution Annotated in structured-data format is also within your mission. As the respective repository and publisher of government-generated information, providing public access to an authoritative explanation of our nation’s founding document, as interpreted over the years, is the kind of thing you do.

So I ask you, on Constitution Day 2014, let’s get this fixed before next year. We’re happy to help.

The Congressional Data Coalition is proud to be sponsoring a panel proposal at SXSW Interactive next year in Austin, TX. The PanelPicker voting process is open now until September 6th at midnight. Your vote will help us get our ideas out at Austin’s annual gathering of 30,000 technologists, activists, and entrepreneurs.

Speakers include: Molly Schwartz, R Street Institute; Rebecca Williams, Sunlight Foundation; Molly Bohmer, Cato Institute; and Daniel Schuman, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington.

See the full panel description: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/35484

The federal government can’t find $619 billion dollars on the website it built six years ago to give a transparent account of its spending activities. USA Today‘s Gregory Korte has the full story:

A government website intended to make federal spending more transparent is missing at least $619 billion from 302 federal programs, a government audit has found. And the data that does exist is wildly inaccurate, according to the Government Accountability Office, which looked at 2012 spending data. Only 2% to 7% of spending data on USASpending.gov is “fully consistent with agencies’ records,” according to the report….OMB spokesman Jamal Brown said the administration is already working to improve the data.

The website is currently maintained by the Office of Management and Budget, and had an initial budget of $15 million.

Hat tip to AEI’s Arthur Brooks for the tweeting the story.