Daniel Schuman and I have a new op-ed on legislative data in The Hill:
Nearly two decades ago, Congress began publishing some of its activities online, revolutionizing access to essential public information. The system was called THOMAS, after our third president. Managed by the Library of Congress, it aimed to serve as a central hub to find bills and resolutions, the Congressional Record, committee reports, treaties and so on. There’s no doubt that, for 1995, this was a huge leap forward.
While technology has changed a lot since the mid 1990s, the quality of data coming from Congress has not kept up. Complicating matters, the THOMAS website is set to be retired and replaced with Congress.gov by the end of 2014. Once this happens, applications that have been developed with this data, and that are used extensively by congressional members and their staff, interest groups and citizens, will stop working.
