While publishers and media outlets have struggled with the proliferation of inexpensive content in the digital age, the minimal costs of distributing information has a bright side: New opportunities for reform and accountability in our government.
Watchdog journalists and citizens alike enjoy unprecedented access to public information. Anyone these days can look at all manner of audits and reports from the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office and many more government agencies. This is a good thing for our public life.
One taxpayer-funded service has remained woefully opaque, however. The Congressional Research Service is an agency of the Library of Congress dedicated to serving Congress. Known as “Congress’s think tank,” it supplies nonpartisan research and advice — in the form of reports — to congressional staff, committees and members of Congress. These reports cover a preponderance of topics. Most of them are prepared at the request of members of Congress and their staff.
Even though the CRS is funded by taxpayers to the tune of more than $100 million a year, it is prohibited by a provision in its funding appropriations bill from releasing its reports directly to the public. Members of Congress and congressional staffers, however, can and do share CRS reports with the public (providing they jump through the bureaucratic hoops of one of Congress’s two oversight committees).
The result is that thousands of CRS reports are scattered across the Internet at different websites, government and otherwise. Special services exist to provide comprehensive access to the haphazard release of CRS reports, but they are expensive and used mainly by beltway insiders. This means reports are in danger of being abused for political ends by members of Congress. They make important policy decisions based on CRS reports they commission, but more often than not, the only reports released to the public are the ones members of Congress want their constituents and the press to see.
“The policy is irrational, inefficient, and costly,” writes Kevin Kosar, a former CRS analyst and manager. Kosar notes that there is no reason why CRS reports must be available exclusively to Congress (they are non-confidential and do not contain any classified information), and every reason why they should be accessible to the public. Taxpayers fund the CRS. It’s only fair they have access to reports produced by legislators and CRS staff. It would cost little to provide them electronically in one simple, organized website.
The authority to change this policy rests solely in the hands of Congress, and it is time it took a step toward greater transparency.
The movement to make CRS reports public has broad support across organizations and parties. In October, 22 former employees of the CRS sent a letter to Congress in “support of timely, comprehensive free public access to CRS reports … That would place all members of the public on an equal footing to one another with respect to access.”
The letter came on the heels of a similar call from a coalition of 40 pro-transparency groups from both the left and the right urging Congress to remedy the “disheartening inequality” of access to CRS reports between insiders with connections on Capitol Hill and the general public.
In Congress, Reps. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., and Mike Quigley, D-Ill., are leading the latest bipartisan efforts in the House for reports to be made public. “The American taxpayer deserves access to the same objective and nonpartisan CRS analyses on which we rely as Members of Congress,” they wrote in The Hill. “What is good for Congress should be good for the general public.”
Most recently, Rep. Quigley took to the House floor in support of House Resolution 34, which would make non-confidential CRS reports public. “This resolution gives the public tools to cut through the misinformation they face,” he said, “it gives them access to something they are already paying for, and it empowers the American people to hold Congress accountable for the decisions we make.”
Coming from elected officials, that last point is significant. As Reps. Lance and Quigley attest, members of Congress and their staff use these reports to make major legislative decisions. With so much of the public’s ire over Congress directed at the glut of insider lobbyists, special interest groups and closed-door meetings that shape our laws, wouldn’t it be nice if our elected officials’ decision-making process was just a little more transparent?
The arguments against keeping the reports exclusively in the hands of Congress lack weight. They are based primarily on concerns that it could put the CRS in an “intermediate position between members and their constituents.” Opponents of public release tout the danger of the public politicizing CRS reports by smearing the service and calling into question its nonpartisanship. Such abuses may occur, but the press and other experts in the public would be free and able to act as a corrective. If anything, greater public scrutiny will give the CRS extra incentives to produce quality research.
Indeed, every argument against the public release of CRS reports ultimately fails to address the fact that the genie is already out of the bottle. Thousands of CRS reports in recent years have already been made public. A Google search cited by former CRS employees in their letter to Congress turned up 27,000 CRS reports, only about 4,300 of which were hosted on .gov domains. There’s no easy way for the public to find all the available CRS products because they are floating around in cyberspace. Why not consolidate and streamline the process?
The Library of Congress Mission Statement captures the crux of the issue at stake here: “For a democracy to be dynamic and self-correcting, its governing institutions must be not only continuously accountable to the people, but also solidly based on a body of knowledge that is both constantly expanding and available equally to those who legislate and to those who elect the legislators.”
Current stipulations by Congress may forbid the CRS from making its reports public, but the principles undergirding its purpose suggest a policy of greater transparency. The Library of Congress is in the business of providing public information because it belongs to the public. Along with Congress, it exists to serve the people. Congress and the Library of Congress can start serving us better by making CRS reports accessible in one public location.
Andrew Collins is a digital media writer for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
