The Congressional Research Service launched its new public portal this morning, with an initial installment of 628 reports dating back to January of this year. The back catalog of older reports is supposed to be added over time.
The public versions of the reports are lightly redacted to remove the author’s contact information, and to add some boilerplate language about CRS.
At this point, CRS is only posting its primary “R series” reports, such as these newly updated documents (provided here in their original, unmodified format):
American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, updated September 14, 2018
Congressional Primer on Responding to Major Disasters and Emergencies, updated September 13, 2018
“In keeping with our desire to engage users with the Library and its materials,” wrote Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, “we are happy to see these reports put to the widest use possible.”
But other CRS product lines — including CRS In Focus, CRS Insight, and CRS Legal Sidebar — are not currently available through the public portal. So CRS reports like these must still be obtained independently:
Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks in U.S. Agriculture, CRS In Focus, September 17, 2018
Hurricane Florence: Brief Overview of FEMA Programs and Resources, CRS Insight, updated September 13, 2018
Locomotive Idling, Air Quality, and Blocked Crossings, CRS In Focus, updated September 13, 2018
The new public collection of CRS reports was created in response to legislation “ending the legal requirement prohibiting CRS from providing its products to the public,” according to CRS.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.