Author: Daniel Schuman

Forecast for October 21, 2019

ELIJAH CUMMINGS

Elijah Cummings has died. He rightly has been lauded for his many achievements and common decency; we remember him as a champion for open and accountable government and his tireless efforts to build a more perfect union. He will lie in state in the rotunda on Thursday; his funeral is Friday. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

CONGRESS IN BRIEF

The House is in for the next 2 weeks, the Senate for the next 5.

• Hugh Halpern was nominated to be the new Director of the Government Publishing Office. He had served as Republican floor director and previously as staff director for the House Rules Committee. Mr. Halpern played a significant role in bringing transparency to the House Rules Committee and modernizing the House’s rules. I’ve had the pleasure of working with him over the years and found him smart, capable, engaged, curious, patient, and genuine.

• The hottest ticket in town last week was the 7th annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. We will be covering it more fully in an upcoming article, but we’ve hit the highlights below. We particularly enjoyed the quarterly update from the Bulk Data Task Force. This amazing working group (that welcome engagement from all quarters) brings together experts from across the legislative branch to improve how Congress works, focusing on technology and transparency. Continue reading “Forecast for October 21, 2019” →

Forecast for October 14, 2019

Welcome back. The next recess is Nov. 4 for the House and Nov. 25 for the Senate. Buckle up.

CONGRESS IN BRIEF
Approps count-down. The CR ends the week before Thanksgiving—maybe there will be another CR to Christmas, or a full year CR, or a shutdown. I suspect House Approps Chair Nita Lowey, who announced she won’t run in the 117th after 31 years in Congress, has had enough of this stuff. Are you ready to rumble? Expect an approps succession fight, with Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Marcy Kaptur jostling for the top spot—Lowey beat Kaptur in 2012—and everyone else  looking to move up.

The legislative and technology event of the season has arrived! This newsletter isn’t exactly a gold-embossed invitation, but you really should come to (or watch online) the 7th Annual House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, set for this Thursday. RSVP here. We’ve been to ‘em all. Come say hi and get a First Branch Forecast sticker or magnet.

We’re still stuck on the FY 2019 approps bills, especially as that fiscal year just ended. We’ve kept track of whether the Leg Branch Approps bill (and accompanying House and Senate report language) have been implemented. Come on, click here, you know you want to see our nifty checklist of what’s done, what’s half-done, and what’s late. Here’s a summary of what we found.

leg-branch-checklist Continue reading “Forecast for October 14, 2019” →

The Leg Branch Approps To-Do List for FY 2019

Congress requested a number of improvements to how the legislative branch functions as part of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (and, in one instance, for FY 2018). What happened?

We reviewed the status of requested leg branch projects in the following chart and then provided an issue-by-issue analysis. We expect to have more status updates at this week’s upcoming Legislative Data and Transparency Conference.

Leg Branch Checklist Continue reading “The Leg Branch Approps To-Do List for FY 2019” →

Forecast for October 7, 2019

TOP LINE

The impeachment inquiry is underway — so why don’t members have a sufficiently-cleared staff to help them do their jobs? (They should.) By the way, this Ryan Grimm story on why the Democratic caucus moved towards impeachment is the best one out there.

RSVP for the Legislative Data & Transparency Conference, set for Thursday October 17th. Hosted by House Admin in the CVC, it brings members and staff from the House, Senate, support offices, and support agencies (and us) to talk about improving congressional tech and transparency. RSVP here. Wanna give a lightning talk?

Speaking of tech, join us on Tuesday for “Time for an Upgrade: Getting Better Tech for Congress” at 12 in 2075 Rayburn, hosted by LegBranch.org.

Continue reading “Forecast for October 7, 2019” →

Sens. Peters and Portman Intro Transparency Bill for Agency Spending Plans

On Friday, Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Rob Portman (R-OH) introduced legislation to make it much easier to find how federal agencies propose to spend federal funds. The Congressional Budget Justification Transparency Act of 2019 (S. 2560) requires all agencies to publish a plain language explanation of their funding proposal — known as a Congressional Justification (CJ) —  online within two weeks of submitting them to Congress. Users must be able to download reports individually and in bulk, and agencies are encouraged to publish the CJs as structured data. 

Currently, getting your hands on these federal spending roadmaps can be a challenge. This adds yet another hurdle to tracking federal spending, an already tricky topic. Trust us, we’ve tried. Here’s the problem: Continue reading “Sens. Peters and Portman Intro Transparency Bill for Agency Spending Plans” →

7th Annual House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Announced

The seventh annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference has been announced!

On Thursday October 17th, agencies, data users, and transparency advocates will come together to discuss Congress’s efforts to make legislative information available to the public as data.

The conference covers what’s working well, what’s not, and provides an opportunity to hear from and meet with the people working to make things better.

You can RSVP for the Thursday, October 17, 2019 event here.

You can find recaps of prior conferences and links to video from the conferences here:

The OLC SUNLIGHT Act brings much needed transparency to DOJ legal opinions

The OLC SUNLIGHT Act — which would bring desperately needed transparency and accountability to the often secret opinions of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel — was introduced today.

How often are those opinions secret? No one knows, because there’s no publicly or congressionally-available list of all the opinions. The opinions that have become publicly available reveal that they often have undermined federal legislation and reinterpreted the Constitution in ways favorable to the executive branch and harmful to the framers’ system of checks and balances. This is intolerable.

The OLC Sunlight Act does two things —

  1. It requires a publicly available list of all OLC opinions, including when they are issued and a summary of the legal question presented.
  2. It requires OLC to publish all its final opinions online, with allowances for text to be withheld when it is properly classified, contains materials that impact privacy, and in other limited circumstances.

The original cosponsors are Reps. Matt Cartwright, (PA) Mike Quigley (IL), Zoe Lofgren (CA), Blumenauer (OR), Cardenas (CA), Carson (IN), Clay (MO), Davis (CA), Gomez (CA), Johnson, Jr. (GA), Hill (CA), Holmes Norton (DC), Phillips (MN), Raskin (MD), Tlaib (MI), and Vargas (CA). A bipartisan coalition of 17 organizations from across the political spectrum, including us, issued a letter endorsing the legislation.

Congress has long struggled to provide public and congressional transparency to OLC opinions. We are a nation of laws, not a nation of secret laws. In our system of government, Congress makes the law, not the president, and the president must faithfully execute the law.

We applaud the cosponsors for introducing the legislation. Public access to OLC opinions has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and we urge all Members of Congress to take up the fight for the rule of law.

A modernized OTA is a key step in addressing Congress’s S&T capacity gap

by Daniel Schuman and Zach Graves

Last week, bipartisan bicameral legislation was introduced by Reps. Mark Takano (D-CA) and Bill Foster (D-IL), and Sens. Maizie Hirono (D-HI) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), aimed at strengthening Congress’s ability to understand science and technology policy issues. (H.R. 4426, S. 2509) We welcome these developments and are encouraged to see ongoing bipartisan support for enhancing Congress’s science and technology capacity and expertise. Continue reading “A modernized OTA is a key step in addressing Congress’s S&T capacity gap” →

Forecast for September 23, 2019.

This week’s First Branch Forecast is a big one, so here’s your guide to what’s inside:

• Who’s the turkey now? The CR sets up a pre-Turkey-day approps showdown; meanwhile, the Fix Congress committee held a hearing on fixing the budget process.

• Congress’s power of the purse is its greatest weapon against executive overreach; more below on how the leg branch ceded power to the presidency and what lawmakers could do about it.

• OTA 2.0. A new bicameral, bipartisan bill from Reps. Takano and Foster and Sens. Hirono and Tillis would create a Congressional Office of Technology to provide science and technology policy support to lawmakers.

• Can whistleblowers talk to Congress? It’s long been obvious there are significant flaws with how intel community whistleblowers can reach out to Congress. This week it was compounded by an administration that apparently is blocking the ICIG from sharing a whistleblower complaint concerning an alleged presidential effort to induce a foreign country (Ukraine) into reopening an investigation into a political opponent (Biden’s son).

• Should sitting presidents be indictable? Speaker Pelosi called for a new law — possibly to relieve pressure from calls to start impeachment proceedings — but given DOJ’s role as an arm of the president and OLC’s often self-serving guidance, it’s tough to see how this is workable or whether it’s just a distraction.

• Hear, hear. Kevin Kosar suggested the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress should be made permanent. There is no doubt that someone inside Congress must be responsible for taking the big picture perspective on how Congress should grow and modernize. Continue reading “Forecast for September 23, 2019.” →

Best Wishes for the Constitution Annotated on the Constitution’s 232rd Birthday

232 years ago today, 38 delegates came together to sign the U.S. Constitution. While there’s a lot of fanfare around the founding document, there’s not much noise about its lesser-known, handy companion, the Constitution Annotated (CONAN). Fortunately, Sens. Portman and King released a letter last week making some noise, calling for CONAN to be available online in an accessible format for everyone to us. Today it appears the Library of Congress has listened. (See their blogpost making the announcement and detailing the new website).

CONAN is a legal treatise prepared by the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service and published by the Government Publishing Office (GPO). The document is a non-partisan and comprehensive analysis of how the Supreme Court has interpreted the U.S. Constitution.

For a decade, we’ve been asking the Library of Congress and GPO to publish CONAN online in an accessible and user-friendly format. Congress shared our sentiments in 2010 when lawmakers authorized the Library to improve public access — “to update the online edition as frequently as possible, and to create new and improved functions on the CONAN site.” Lawmakers also noted “Congress and the public should find this site accessible and user friendly.”  Continue reading “Best Wishes for the Constitution Annotated on the Constitution’s 232rd Birthday” →