All non-confidential reports of the Congressional Research Service must be made publicly available online through a Government Publishing Office website within 90 to 270 days under a provision of the 2018 omnibus appropriations act that was passed by Congress and signed by the President last week.
The move is the culmination of more than two decades of efforts to encourage, cajole or coerce Congress into making the reports broadly available to the public. (See “Liberating the Congressional Research Service,” Secrecy & Government Bulletin, March 1997.)
“Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports are the gold standard when it comes to even-handed, non-partisan analysis of the important issues before Congress,” said Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, who led the most recent campaign for online public access. “For too long, they’ve only been primarily available to the well-connected and the well-heeled. At long last, Congress will make the non-confidential reports available to every American for free,” he said. See “Long-Proprietary Congressional Research Reports Will Now Be Made Public” by Charles S. Clark, Government Executive, March 23, 2018.
In fact, however, the large majority of CRS reports have already been posted online and are easily available to the public, though not through government websites. So the net increase in “transparency” resulting from the new legislation is less than it would have been years ago.
After President Trump claimed on Friday that the omnibus appropriations law will provide the largest military pay increase in over a decade, a New York Times fact-checking column cited a CRS report to demonstrate that the claim was “imprecise” and “slightly exaggerated.” See “Trump’s Objections Require Some Corrections” by Linda Qiu, March 23.
The Times article provided a link to an online copy of the January 2018 CRS report on military pay.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
To better understand what might drive the way we live, learn, and work in 2050, we’re asking the community to share their expertise and thoughts about how key factors like research and development infrastructure and automation will shape the trajectory of the ecosystem.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.