House Publishes More Earmarks Request Data, Which We Enhance

At the end of last week, the House Appropriations Committee published all earmark requests for FY 2024 on the committee’s website, including publishing them as a spreadsheet. This is great and welcome news. For the first time, the appropriations spreadsheet separated member names into different columns and included state, district, party, and recipient address. This makes the information significantly more usable. Thank you.

In fact, it’s so usable, we spent a little time over the weekend making it even more robust. We enhanced their spreadsheet by adding bioguide IDs for each member, appropriations subcommittee codes, a standardized recipient address (with help from ChatGPT), and extracted the recipient state and zip code. We have been playing around with using the AI to categorize whether the recipient entity is a non-profit or a governmental entity. We can imagine a lot of use cases for this cleaned-up data.

The spreadsheet is available online here. We are continuing to tinker with it.

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Congressional Data Task Force Meeting Set For June 22, 2023

The next Congressional Data Task Force Meeting is set for June 22, 2023 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm EST.

The meeting will take place in hybrid format. You must register online here, at which point you’ll be prompted to indicate whether you want to attend virtually or in person. If you attend in-person, the meeting will take place in the House Longworth Building, room B-248/B-249.

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Notes from the Congressional Hackathon on April 6, 2022

(Everyone is welcome to add edits/ comments. Document created by Daniel Schuman at Demand Progress daniel@demandprogress.org)

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Recap: Congressional Data Task Force December 2022 Meeting

The newly renamed Congressional Data Task Force met virtually on December 13, 2022. Resources on the event, including a video of the proceedings, slides from the clerk and slides from GPO, are available on the Innovation Hub here.

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Congressional Data Task Force Meeting Announced for March 14, 2023

The next Congressional Data Task Force Meeting is scheduled for 2-4PM EST on Tuesday, March 14, 2023.

To register, use the following link: https://ushr.webex.com/weblink/register/r10370082ab6d3795e3bd3a105f7c717d.

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House of Reps Publishes Unofficial Member Data for 118th Congress

In advance of the start of the 118th Congress, the House of Representatives published resources on members of the House on the Clerk’s webpage on December 30, 2022. The resources include:

To download the information, go to the Clerk’s page > Member Information > look to the column on the far right entitled “Additional Resources.” I’ve included a screenshot below.

Screenshot of Member Information Screen from the House Clerk's website.
Screenshot of Member Information Screen from the House Clerk’s website

Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress Meeting Set for December 5, 2022

The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress announced its semi-annual meeting will be held on December 5, 2012, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET at the Government Publishing Office. Back in June, we had request that these meetings include a virtual component, but the notice apparently requires in-person attendance only and the meetings are not otherwise recorded. We have reached out again to request a virtual aspect for those who cannot attend in person.

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Improving the House Statement of Disbursements: Feedback Requested

The House of Representatives wants to improve how the Statements of Disbursements are published as data and they are asking for your help and input. A summary of how we got to this point is immediately below. Skip to the bottom if you want to share your views on how the Statements of Disbursements should be published, including reviewing a sample data set that contains the House’s proposal as well as a link to where you can provide feedback.

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Recap of the September 2022 Congressional Data Task Force Meeting

The Congressional Data Task Force provided a series of legislative branch technology updates at its third quarter meeting on September 29, 2022, including a CAO presentation on adding metadata to Statements of Disbursement, a recap of the Library of Congress Virtual Public Forum, updates on the comparative print project and E-Hopper, updates on how the Congress.gov API beta is handling committee codes, and more. 

We have a full report below on what happened at the two-hour meeting below, and here are some highlights:

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The Recap: Library of Congress 2022 Virtual Public Forum

On September 21, 2022, the Library of Congress held its 2022 Virtual Public Forum on the Library’s role in providing access to legislative information. You can find summaries of the 2020 and 2021 forums here and here. It is our understanding that video of the proceedings will be made publicly available, and we will update this blogpost when that happens. Update: Video posted on 10/4/2022.

The forum mainly focused on Congress.gov and access to legislative information through electronic means, although it included significant discussion on digitization efforts. Legislative branch stakeholders made presentations on their work, including the House Clerk, Secretary of the Senate, the Government Publishing Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Law Library of Congress, and the Congressional Research Service. The Library noted several hundred individuals RSVPed, and participants voiced their appreciation for the forum and recommended continuing it in the future.

An agenda was not released in advance of the meeting, which lasted 3 hours, and covered recent enhancements to Congress.gov, its features and new releases, recent projects, updates from data partners, a presentation from the Congressional Budget Office on its transparency efforts, a discussion of legislative data standards, a presentation on the Constitution Annotated, a brief history of Congress.gov and THOMAS, and a Q&A at the end. We suggest that, for future meetings, the agenda and rough timing be published in advance.

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