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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 22 2016, @06:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the part-of-the-solution dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Going back nearly a decade, we've been talking about the ridiculousness of Congress refusing to publicly release reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). As we've discussed many times, CRS is an in-house think tank for Congress that is both famously non-partisan and actually really good at what they do. CRS reports tend to be really useful and highly credible (which is part of the reason why Congress isn't a fan of letting them out into the public). Of course, as works of the federal government, CRS reports are in the public domain, but the way it's always worked is that the reports are released only to members of Congress. These include both general reports on topics that are released to every member of Congress, or specific research tasked by a member for the CRS to investigate and create a new report. The members who receive the reports are able to release them to the public, and some do, but the vast majority of CRS work remains hidden from public view. For the most part, both CRS and Congress have resisted any attempt to change this. Going back decades, they've put together a mostly ridiculous list of reasons opposing plans to more widely distribute CRS reports.

Some members of Congress keep introducing bills to make these public domain CRS reports actually available to the public. We've written about such attempts in 2011, 2012, 2015 and earlier this year. And each time they get shot down, often for completely ridiculous reasons, including the belief that making these reports public will somehow hurt CRS's ability to continue to do good, non-partisan research.

[...] But earlier this week, there was a new entrant: EveryCRSReport.com. Unlike basically all of the other aggregators of CRS reports that collect released reports and aggregate them, it appears that EveryCRSReport basically has teamed up with members of Congress who have access to a massive stash of CRS reports loaded onto the Congressional intranet, all of which have been released via the site -- and it appears that the site is automatically updated, suggesting that the still nameless Congressional partners have set up a way to continually feed in new reports. To avoid public pressure or harassment (one of the core reasons used by Congress and CRS to reject proposals to open up the content), the site removes the names and contact info of the CRS staffers who create the reports. The reports that are available are not just in unsearchable PDFs, but they're fully HTML and fully searchable.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161019/23533935842/this-is-huge-new-project-releases-all-current-non-confidential-congressional-research-service-reports.shtml


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  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday October 22 2016, @03:38PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 22 2016, @03:38PM (#417593) Journal

    So people will have access to previously produced CRS reports. Nice! Reports requested by someone in congress. Hmmmm. What if you want to know something that is not already reported on? And... you don't have the resources to explore/research on your own?

    1.) Persuade one or more people in Congress to request the research.
    2.) Wait.
    3.) Watch EveryCRSReport.com for the results.
    4.) Download free research!

    I'm still not fully awake, but I see some opportunities with this approach... anyone else like to flesh out the idea some more?

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:20AM (#417729)

    I'm through with Homework Hotline.