The Committee on House Administration will host its fifth annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on June 21, from 9–4 in the U.S. Capitol.
The #LDTC16 brings individuals from Legislative Branch agencies together with data users and transparency advocates to foster a conversation about the use of legislative data — addressing how agencies use technology well and how they can use it better in the future.
The conferences are an amazing opportunity to engage with internal and external congressional stakeholders on making Congress more transparent and opening up legislative information. Perhaps even more importantly, they have become a place where everyone works together to find a way to make Congress work better and become more effective.
We expect to co-host a happy hour after the conference, location TBD.
What was it like in previous years? Well, here are write-ups from previous conferences:
For the fifth year in a row, today members of the Congressional Data Coalitionsubmitted testimony to House Appropriators on ways to open up legislative information. The bipartisan coalition focused on tweaking congressional procedures and releasing datasets that, in the hands of third parties, will strengthen Congress’ capacity to govern.
The testimony took note of notable successes:
We commend the House of Representatives for its ongoing efforts to open up congressional information. We applaud the House of Representatives for publishing online and in a structured data format bill text, status, and summary information — and are pleased the Senate has joined the effort. We commend the ongoing work on the Amendment Impact Program and efforts to modernize how committee hearings are published. We look forward to the release of House Rules and House Statement of Disbursements in structured data formats.
We would also like to recognize the growing Member and Congressional staff public engagement around innovation, civic technology and public data issues. From the 18 Members and dozens of staff participating in last year’s nationwide series of #Hack4Congress civic hacking events to the Second Congressional Hackathon co-sponsored by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, there is a growing level of enthusiastic support inside the institution for building a better Congress with better technology and data. Moreover, the House Ethics Committee’s recent approval of open source software and the launch of the Congressional Open Source Caucus means good things are in store for 2016.
This groundswell of support cuts across all ages, geographic areas and demographics, both inside and outside Congress. We are excited for the House’s 2016 legislative data and transparency conference and appreciate the quarterly public meetings of the Bulk Data Task Force.
And made recommendations on where the House should focus next or what kinds of data should be released:
● Extend and Broaden the Bulk Data Task Force ● Release the Digitized Historical Congressional Record and Publish Future Editions in XML ● Publish all Congress.gov Information in Bulk and in a Structured Data Format ● Include All Public Laws in Congress.gov ● Publish Calendar of Committee Activities in Congress.gov ● Complete and Auditable Bill Text ● CRS Annual Reports and Indices of CRS Reports ● House and Committee Rules ● Publish Bioguide in XML with a Change Log ● Constitution Annotated ● House Office and Support Agency Reports
Signatories included: Center for Data Innovation, Data Coalition, Demand Progress, Free Government Information, GovTrack.Us, New America’s Open Technology Institute, OpenGov Foundation, OpenTheGovernment.Org, R Street Institute, and the Sunlight Foundation.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (a.k.a. House Intelligence Committee or HPSCI) has its staff hired by the chair and ranking member of the committee. Because of the nature of intelligence committee work, public and outside experts are less able to render assistance than with other committees.
As a result, members of Congress rely more than usual on their staff to provide confidential advice and assistance — and those staff must have the highest levels of clearance to be useful. It is only with top clearances that it becomes possible to ask the probing questions of intelligence briefers and to have fully informed conversations with Members of Congress. While committee staff can be useful, personal office staff play a unique and distinct role as compared to committee staff in fulfilling this need for individualized assistance.
That is why, in part, that each Senator who serve on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (a.k.a. Senate Intelligence Committee or SSCI) hires a staffer who is responsible to that Senator, can obtain the highest level of clearance, and provides support concerning the work of SSCI.
Providing members of HPSCI with personal office staffers with top security clearances creates parity with the Senate and also expands the pool of staff a Member of Congress with intelligence responsibilities can rely upon.
All this can be accomplished through $125,000 in additional funding to the House Sergeant at Arms to allow personal office designees of members who serve on HPSCI to be able to undergo Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information Security (TS/SCI) investigations.
Some may fret that providing 20-odd congressional staffers high clearance may pose security problems, but considering more than 660,000 executive branch employees have top secret clearance and more than 500,000 contractors have top secret clearance, I suspect the real danger comes from a lack of oversight, not an empowered Congress.
Part IV: The Way Forward Towards A Stronger Congress
How do we use technology to build congressional capacity to perform its work? In part, the work of the Congressional Data Coalition is powering this virtuous cycle in partnership with Congress. Congress works best with a single entity that represents public stakeholders, and the Congressional Data Coalition is a trusted partner. Greater support of the work of the coalition will speed the process up and provide support to the Senate to follow the path trod by the House as well as encourage the House to go further.
Congress, however, still is not equipped to think systematically about how the information revolution can transform the way it governs. For example, with respect to congressional access to information:
Congress requires agencies to provide it thousands of reports, but no effort is made to gather the reports in a central location so that all committees and staff can benefit from the reporting.
Information relevant to Congressional activities is not appropriately contextualized. For example, if a staffer is examining a particular bill, legislative information systems should 1) automatically identify others bills that have the same or similar language over multiple congresses; 2) surface testimony and committee reports associated with those bills; 3) and identify GAO reports, CRS reports, and Dear Colleague letters that cover that subject matter; and other relevant information.
The work product of the Congressional Research Service focuses on producing reports and answering discrete questions. Encouraging analysts to aggregate topical information — think tank reports, news stories, agency statements, hearing information — and regularly share it with staff, perhaps in the form of a email blast, can prevent member offices from duplicating effort and raise the overall quality of work of staffers covering an issue area.
Part III: Bootstrapping Congress Into the Digital Age
How can Congress muster sufficient resources to properly fund its essential functions in an era of asphyxiating budgets? Unsurprisingly for a 227-year-old institution, congressional operations often are inefficient, expensive, or no longer necessary. There’s not a lot of money there, but there’s enough to invest in greater productivity. Moving to a digital congress, and finding cost savings in doing so, is a way forward in transforming how Congress operates.
For example, the House already has moved to publish the House Calendar online so it does not have to physically print and distribute copies to all offices. The same is true of printing and distributing bills, the U.S. code, and other documents. Money saved by making these operational changes can go towards supporting process reforms. To some extent, Congress is moving down this path.
How can Congress get out of the mess it finds itself in? The approach I suggest is to provide Members and staff greater tools and resources do to their jobs. This will enable them to think long term and remove their undue reliance on special interests dedicated to the status quo. In an era where Congress will not spend more money on itself, resources can be freed up by moving Congress into the information age.
For that to be possible, we must answer difficult questions. What are the incentives and choices affecting legislators as legislators? What internal constraints push members of Congress and their staff act as they do? How do you help members of Congress think of themselves collectively as the first branch of government? How do you create enough space so Congress becomes capable of healing itself?
Part 1: A Thought Experiment on Our Broken Legislature
Imagine astronomers discover a giant asteroid on a collision course for Earth, scheduled to collide in 100 years. It is possible to build the technology to deflect the asteroid if we spend $2 trillion dollars now. What would Congress do?
We can guess at the answer. Some members would say we need to study the issue more and defer action until a blue ribbon panel reports back. Others would deny we’re on a collision course. Members from districts that would build the technology to deflect the asteroid would argue the government should spend $4 trillion… just to be safe. Others would suggest we build deep trenches to escape the impact, because doing so would be a lot cheaper. Questions would be raised whether the asteroid is a Chinese or Russian plot. And each party would blame the other for not addressing the asteroid menace and using it to score political points.
While they’re arguing, the asteroid would come closer and closer. The costs of dealing with the problem would mount. And finally, long after the point where anything meaningful could be done, Congress would fund a private sector initiative to build deflection technology that would not work properly.
The United States Senate is a creature of its rules. Through its standing rules, laws and resolutions, precedents, and the consent of its members, the upper chamber carefully controls how legislation can be promulgated and debate can take place.
Unlike the House of Representatives, which must vote on its rules every Congress, the Senate rarely reconsiders its standing rules in their entirety. An opportunity has arisen, however, with the current debate over changing how the filibuster works. Here are our major recommendations for updating the Senate’s rules.
In summary, they are:
Improve Public Access to Information about Legislative Proceedings
Improve Disclosure Around Committee Activities
Improve Transparency Concerning Senate Operations
Improve Public Understanding of Policy Matters
Adopt a “Public Access” Presumption
Catalog Information Held by the Senate
Improve Chamber-Wide Coordination on Open Government
→ Transparency Ombudsman
→ Advisory Committee on Public Access to Information
→ Strengthen Oversight of Legislative Support Agencies
Improve Public Access to Information about Legislative Proceedings
Information regarding legislation pending in the Senate is made available on THOMAS and Congress.gov, but it is not made available in the way that computers can most easily process it — in bulk. In addition to joining with the House to require that legislative data be made available in bulk, the Senate should require that all amendments are online in real-time.
All proposed amendments in the Senate should be available online in a useful format. Unfortunately, while the House releases this information to the public via the THOMAS/ Congress.gov website, the Senate only makes amendments available through the Congressional Record, which is more difficult to access and parse. This information shouldn’t be buried.
All information on presidential nominations filed with the Senate should be available online, except for personally identifiable information (such as home addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers.)
The US House has incrementally moved toward having all legislation available online before floor consideration (even if the House sometimes waives these rules). The Senate, however, has made little to no progress. Legislation, including final committee reports, should be available online for 72 hour prior to a final Senate vote. While forcing the Senate to consider legislation in a particular way will necessarily be tricky (especially in a chamber that functions through unanimous consent), far more should be done to improve public access to legislation prior to votes.
Improve Disclosure Around Committee Activities
All committee and subcommittee hearings and meetings should be webcast except when logistically impossible. The House has a rule to this effect.
All markups should be available to the public at least 24 hours prior to consideration by the committee or subcommittee. To be considered as “publicly available,” they should be online.
Senate committees should write and publish oversight plans, with annually update reports. The House already has this requirement and it works well. See House Rule XI(d).
Improve Transparency Concerning Senate Operations
All public documents held by the Secretary of the Senate for public review should be published online. A list of those documents is available here. Currently, the documents can only be obtained by printing them during a visit to the Senate Office of Public Records on Capitol Hill.
The Senate should publish its semi-annual reports on its internal expenditures online as a downloadable database, and not just as a PDF. The House has just committed to doing this. Doing so would make the information more accessible to the public and facilitate reuse of the data.
“Dear Colleague” letters are one way that a Senator communicates with the rest of the Senate. They’re usually used to indicate support for legislation or other policy initiatives, and are often shared with the public or the press. All of these letters should be made available online on a central website by default unless an originating office decides to specifically exclude one of the letters.
The Senate should create an independent ethics watchdog along the lines of the Office of Congressional Ethics. The OCE has been an invaluable addition to the ethics process in the House, and will bring additional transparency and accountability to the Senate.
Annual, semi-annual and other regularly recurring reports from the legislative support offices (e.g. the Secretary of the Senate, Sergeant at Arms, Parliamentarian) all should be made available online as they are issued. While some legislative support offices do an excellent job of publishing their reports online, other offices have further to go. Access to this information makes it possible for the public to have confidence that the Senate is being operated effectively and efficiently, and also for academics, journalists, and others to make recommendations for improvement.
The Senate should publish a staff directory that includes each staffer’s name, job title, areas of responsibility, and the main phone number and address for the office — not the staffer’s email or direct phone number. This information is already available through pay services run by third-party vendors. It should be available to the public as well.
Improve Public Understanding of Policy Matters
Widely-distributed Congressional Research Service reports should be made available to the public by the Secretary of the Senate’s office. Thousands of CRS Reports are available online, and many more can be purchased through third party-vendors. These frequently-cited documents can help explain important policy issues to the public, and occasionally could benefit from public review for completeness and accuracy. However, they are not available to the public in a timely way, and public access is spotty. Legislation to this effect has frequently been introduced in the Senate (such as S Res 118) that addresses all the important aspects of making these reports freely available to the public. Former CRS employees, public interest groups, and Members of Congress are increasingly calling for public access. It is time to level the playing field.
All reports submitted to the Senate should be made available online, except in limited circumstances. The Senate should look to the draft Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act for guidance on implementation.
The Senate publication “The Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation,” available on the Senate’s intranet but not available to the public except in a printed format, should be made available online as it is updated. This legal treatise that explains the US Constitution as it has been interpreted by the US Supreme Court is an invaluable resource and should be more widely available to the public.
Adopt a “Public Access” Presumption
The Senate should adopt a rule creating a rebuttable presumption in favor of public access to all congressionally-held information. Members, committee and leadership offices, legislative support offices, and (when working on Senate issues) legislative support agencies should be encouraged to make information available to a requester unless there is a strong, clearly articulable reason that outweighs the public’s interest in access. In addition, a response to a requester should be timely, and information should be made available to a requester in the format that is requested unless doing so is not practical.
The Senate should also require the proactive online publication of information that is already available to the public, including historical information that’s stored in electronic form. The Senate should make a particular effort to make legislation, including amendments, available online in a timely fashion, perhaps adopting the successful model used by the House, docs.house.gov. The Senate should also work with the House to create open data standards for the publication of machine-readable information (including bulk access to that data).
Catalog Information Held by the Senate
The Senate creates and holds many documents and data sets. But with so many entities responsible for receiving and generating information, it is not clear to Members, staff, or the public what information is held by the Senate, who is responsible for it, and whether it can be made available to the public. Some thoughtful efforts have been undertaken to consider these issues. For example, legislation has been introduced to require GPO to create a central repository of all reports any office or Department is required to make to Congress. The Senate already compiles a list of ethics reports required to be filed in the Senate. And GPO has made efforts to compile a repository of official Senate documents, although its efforts are hindered by lack of access to the information.
The Senate should undertake an audit of the documents or other information that it holds, who is responsible for the information, the format in which it is stored, and where and how it can be obtained by the public. The House and Senate jointly undertook a related effort in 1992 as memorialized in S. Pub. 102–20. The audit should occur each congress, and be published online as an Index to Senate Information.
Improve Chamber-Wide Coordination on Open Government
Like many large institutions, responsibility for work on a particular issue is often spread out over many offices on the hill. This is particularly true for transparency issues, where leadership, committees, personal offices, and legislative support offices and agencies each have a small part. Unsurprisingly, efforts to coordinate among these offices are difficult, and institution-wide awareness of what’s going on is hard to come by. To improve coordination and awareness, we suggest the Senate consider the following steps.
Transparency Ombudsman
The Senate has key staff responsible for the needs of the chamber. Helping to make the Senate more transparent is a task that spans several of these offices, and is also the responsibility of leadership and several committees. But like most institutions, this diffusion of responsibility means that there is no central point of contact for congressional offices trying to be more transparent, or for those outside the institution to figure out who to contact.
We suggest that the Senate consider creating a transparency ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s responsibilities would include encouraging collaboration and information sharing among those responsible for different transparency efforts inside the Senate, to serve as a resource for those inside the Senate who wish to adopt best practices, to be a primary point of contact for those seeking information from the Senate, and generally to facilitate a more open and transparent Congress.
Advisory Committee on Public Access to Information
The Senate’s efforts to improve transparency are intended to be of benefit to other offices within Congress, co-equal branches of government, the public at large, journalists, academics, and others. There is no regular forum, however, where interested parties can get together and talk with representatives of congress about how to best meet everyone’s needs in the most efficient and effective manner.
We suggest that the Senate create an advisory committee (along the lines of the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress) that provides advice and recommendations to the Senate regarding public access to information.
Strengthen Oversight of Legislative Support Agencies
The Joint Committee on the Library and the Joint Committee on Printing are responsible for coordinating oversight with the House over the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office. Unfortunately, JCP and JCL no longer hold public meetings or hearings and have been hamstrung by the Chadha court decision.
In the past, these committees provided effective guidance and oversight for legislative support agencies, which are responsible for making much of the work of Congress (and the government as a whole) available to the American people. Now, much of the public-facing oversight work is performed by the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee or is subsumed into the responsibilities of the Senate Rules Committees, both of which have other responsibilities. In addition, we have found that different messages are sometimes communicated by the legislative support agencies to their respective House and Senate oversight committees, which may impede the ability to effectively oversee and direct their functions.
We recommend that the Senate explore ways to strengthen public oversight of the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office. It should particularly focus on making sure that Congress has sufficient capacity to effectively ensure that these agencies are properly performing their roles of making information available to the public, and that the oversight process in performed in a way that the public can be properly engaged.
It also may be wise to look more broadly about creating a Chief Technology Officer for the United States Senate, whose office would look at campus-wide issues, including technology needs within the Senate as well as the legislative support agencies.
Appendix
We have more recommendations for improving Senate activities, but they are best accomplished through means other than Senate rules changes. Also, I wrote about this topic previously when I was at the Sunlight Foundation.
At a meeting in April, the Government Publishing Office announced its collaboration with the Library of Congress to digitize all bound volumes of the Congressional Record from 1873–1998. The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress.
The digitization project is pursuant to a 2010 Joint Committee on Printing letter. GPO explained at the April meeting that it had digitized all of the volumes and the “[Library Services and Content Management business unit] was in the acquisitions process for the next step of reviewing the digital content and creating descriptive metadata.”
GPO and the Library should release the digitized volumes now. Even without metadata, the Congressional Record could be searched and put to other uses. Other digitization projects concerning documents held by the Library have taken years while descriptive metadata was created. By contrast, a volunteer-led effort to create descriptive metadata for the Statutes of Large took a matter of months and cost the government nothing.
The National Archives has undertaken similar kinds of projects to what I am proposing. The Archive’s Innovation Hub provides a space for the public to transcribe documents, tag documents, and scan documents and holdings. More information is available at the Citizen Archivist Dashboard.
It is possible the Library/GPO could view this as violating a rule against the public giving gifts to the agency. However, so long as the information is shared publicly with everyone — which is the point of metadata — it would not be a gift to anyone. Similar logic likely underpins the House’s recent decision on the use of Open Source, the White House’s Open Data policy, and the Archive’s collaborative efforts with the public.
I am sure there are benefits to an internal, government-only process … but why hold up public access? We can do both. A collaborative effort around metadata would provide an opportunity for GPO and the Library to engage with the public and to work to make important public documents publicly available. At a minimum, releasing the documents to the public would allow the everyone to collaborate on this effort outside of any limitations on the Library or GPO, perhaps to the immense public benefit of everyone.
The Second Congressional Hackathon will take place at the U.S. Capitol on October 23 from 10–5. Hosted by Majority Leader McCarthy and Democratic Whip Hoyer, the hackathon is intended to explore how we can modernize Congress–from open data to updating constituent engagement.
The First Congressional Hackathon–#InHackWeTrust–was a great event, with tons of information about the ongoing work of the House and, equally as important, it presented a fantastic opportunity for real conversations between staff, technologists, and advocates. I wrote about it here.
With the same offices behind this hackathon, we have high hopes. Since the first congressional hackathon, there has been a series of public meetings and conferenceshosted by the Clerk of the House, the launch of new pro-transparency congressional policies and tools, the creation of the open source caucus, and a civil society-organized congressional hackathon entitled #Hack4Congress. With so many new resources available (and more coming soon), and a spirit of cooperation between congressional staff and the public, I cannot wait to see what can be accomplished.
We will post more information as it becomes available.
