Last Thursday, March 10, the Bulk Data Task Force held its first quarterly meeting of 2022. The virtual meeting, hosted by the House Clerk’s office, featured presentations from civil society representatives and updates from several legislative branch organizations including GPO, the Library of Congress, the House CAO, the House Clerk, Majority Leader Hoyer’s office, the Secretary of the Senate, and CBO. As Kirsten Gullickson from the House Clerk’s office noted, the virtual format allowed people to participate worldwide. Information from these meetings are posted online.
The video is not yet available, but we will update the blogpost when it is; you can also check here.
Mark your calendars: the second quarterly meeting is scheduled for June 9 from 2-3:30 EST.
REPRESENTATIVES FROM LEG BRANCH ORGANIZATIONS SHARED UPDATES:
GPO provided an update on the digitization of US Statutes at Large. Statutes dating back to 1951 have been made available (in USLM format); the office is working its way back to 1789. GPO also mentioned significant API improvements, including the relationship between committee prints to bills and relating separate parts of multipart hearings. Congressional hearings are now listed with an event ID included.
Soon, GPO will enable the retrieval of individual documents from serial sets; build committee prints related to enacted laws; and access individual Senate amendments in the congressional record. Right now, amendments can only be accessed in batches — this update will improve the accessibility of amendments. GPO will also update how bill text is displayed on Congress.gov to remove the line breaks and display the text in a cleaner format. Finally, the Constitution Annotated will be published later this year.
The Library of Congress has a new feature that allows you to add events listed on the committee schedule to your own calendar. Published hearing transcripts are now globally searchable using the following queries:
• Can search hearingTranscript:* (everything represented by that field)
• hearingTranscript:honey (limits to mentioning the word honey in the transcript)
CAO spoke about the formation of the House Digital Service Team, including the recruitment process for new staff. CAO received ~200 applicants to do UX design, product management, and software engineering for the new team.
The Clerk spoke about the eHopper project, an electronic submission solution for legislation, which is now being piloted in a small group of members’ offices. A program allowing the comparison of legislative texts — whether drafts, bills, or laws — is in development and has been for quite a while.
We also note two important committee tools the Clerk is developing: an updated lobbying disclosure system (this is something ModCom has requested) and a Member information System which manages all member and committee data and informs the authoritative lists posted on clerk.xml.gov. It’s important we have up-to-date information about which members serve on which committees.
The Clerk is also working on congressional redistricting and congressional transitions. The Clerk of the House has historically treated incumbents as non-entities until sworn in, but now will be collecting and punishing information on incoming members in November, not January. This change in how the Clerk views what constitutes official data is a notable precedent, and could significantly expand the Clerk’s purview down the line.
Majority Leader Hoyer’s office announced the congressional hackathon 4.0, to be held April 6 from 1-6 PM, and announced the soft launch of a directory feature — and memorization ‘game’ — on DomeWatch, Hoyer’s app. Directory.domewatch.us will soon launch for android.
The Senate is working to upgrade its legacy systems. It is working to improve Senate floor proceedings and hopefully committee proceedings as well — and to integrate that data with information on congress.gov. This should improve the availability of Senate proceedings online.
CBO discussed its recent report on transparency within the agency, released in advance of Sunshine Week, which rounds up material related to the methods underlying CBO’s tax modeling and other analyses and lists other transparency measures. CBO has begun publishing its annual requests for appropriations; has made CBO advisors’ financial disclosure statements available upon request (which we wrote about previously); and has added sections to its website estimating costs of budget reconciliation and of legislation to be considered in the House under suspension of the rules.
TechCongress plugged its report on the Congressional Digital Service Pilot Program, and noted it’s still drafting a number of modernization reports which will be posted to the House Admin Committee’s website once completed. Also, word to the wise: the Bulk Data Task Force will be renamed the Congressional Data Task Force sometime in the future.
The meeting ran out of time for Q&A and presentations from public stakeholders, so the next meeting is scheduled to run 2 hours instead of 90 minutes.
You can find our report from the last Bulk Data Task Force meeting, on October 2021, here.
