Today the Library of Congress began publishing (some) Congressional Research Service reports as HTML and making (some) reports accessible via API. See the announcement here.
CRS reports are the non-confidential non-partisan reports generated by Congress’s 100-year-old think tank, the Congressional Research Service. The reports, which are one of many services and products generated by agency, can provide valuable insights into policy issues before Congress.
Members of the public and Members of Congress have long pressed CRS to make their reports publicly available. See, for example, this letter dated August 6, 1997. Senators McCain and Leahy first introduced a bill for public access in March 1998. Since the late 90s, the research service fought vigorously against direct public access for spurious reasons, although the service had made some reports available to the public in the past, and members of Congress routinely made the reports publicly available.
In 2018, Reps. Quigley and Lance in the House of Representatives and Sen. Leahy and McCain in the Senate were successful in enacting the Equal Access to CRS Reports Act in 2018 through inclusion in an appropriations bill. The measure required relatively contemporaneous reports to be made publicly available online, for CRS to look at more modern methods to publish the reports, and encouraged CRS to publish their historical reports.
Since then, CRS built a very basic website and ignored all public input on how it could better serve the needs of users. The service also resisted publishing the reports publicly in formats beside PDF, even though they were internally available in HTML, and resisted publishing the back catalog. As you can imagine, this has been an issue of contention. For more background, read my FY 2024 testimony on the topic requesting HTML reports and the back catalog.
By comparison, Dr. Josh Tauberer of Govtrack.us and I have been publishing CRS reports online since March 2016 at everycrsreport.com because we believe the public should have free access to the reports. We have more than 22,000 reports online, many more than CRS. We made it possible to see when a report has been updated by showing track changes. We transformed the reports into ePub format so you could read it on your kindle. We implemented an improved search capability. And we published all the code and the reports online for free. Our goal, ultimately, is for the official website to put us out of business. Today we are a step closer.
Fortunately, a few years ago, House Appropriators directed CRS to publish their reports online as HTML and to make several other changes. This is the fruit that has ripened today. See the direction from appropriators to CRS on page 26 of the House Legislative Branch Committee report calling for these improvements.
Congressional Research Service Reports in HTML: The Committee directs the Library of Congress to make available to the public the most recent version of all non-confidential CRS Reports contained on the public crsreports.congress.gov website in HTML format, or a successor format when appropriate, to facilitate use and reuse of information contained in the reports. To the extent practical, this enhancement of the public CRS report site should be implemented within one year of the enactment of this legislation. The Library can satisfy this requirement by contemporaneously publishing this information in bulk, such as through the Government Publishing Office’s bulk data repository.
I am so appreciative of appropriators requiring CRS and the Library of Congress to improve public access to the reports. And I’m pleased to see the new CRS products home page. It is obvious that Library of Congress staff worked hard to make the changes. I’m looking forward to kicking the tires. I do hope at some point they become more comfortable and actually consult with the public when they develop these tools.
So what exactly has changed?
- Publishing the reports as HTML means that you can easily read the CRS reports on your mobile device. The documents will automatically resize, so you’re not trying to expand a PDF. This also makes it possible for persons with visual disabilities to be able to more easily read the reports.
- Making the reports accessible by API means that anyone can programmatically access the report without having to go to the webpage and manually download them. This will increase access and dissemination.
- The Library of Congress is also more fully integrating the CRS reports into its website. This means you can now search for them off the main page and more people are likely to find them.
- CRS reports will show up next to relevant bills. This means users of Congress.gov will have more contextual information about the legislation they are reviewing.
If the new website and API access is as good as we hope, the next and final step will be for CRS to make the historical reports publicly available. CRS already has digitized thousands of reports in its CRSX archive, along with appropriate metadata. It should work to make those reports available to the public, either on its own or in collaboration with a partner (like GPO or a federal depository library.)
Thank you to the appropriators who directed these improvements to public access to CRS reports and to the Library staff who worked hard to make those goals a reality.
