Where Congress Learns About Congress
Good news for Hill staff and Congressional spending nerds alike: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has made some significant improvements to how it publishes data.
The agency, which is responsible for advising Congress on the potential economic impact of legislation, announced several transparency-friendly changes on its site last week. Changes include: Continue reading “CBO Changes Make Finding Bill Scores Easy”
For the week ending December 5, 2019, there were six Capitol Police incidents reported; six individuals arrested. The incidents were primarily traffic related. Scroll down to see how this week’s activity compares to overall trends for the last year or so. Continue reading “Capitol Police Round Up: Week Ending December 5, 2019”
We are resuming our weekly updates on U.S. Capitol Police activity, which were previously embedded in our weekly newsletter the First Branch Forecast.
For the week ending on November 21, 2019, there were 13 incidents reported with a total of 56 individuals arrested.
Noteworthy incidents included an individual attempting to bring an unregistered firearm and ammunition into the Russell Senate office building—he was arrested when his weapon went through the x-ray machine—and USCP approaching and arresting someone for suspected marijuana use. (The USCP’s role is to protect the Capitol Complex, so it is unclear how a pot arrest contributes to congressional safety and security.)
Here’s how this week’s activity compares to the average distribution:
Every year the Congressional Research Service submits a report to Congress that provides some information about the agency’s work over the preceding year. From these reports you can glean some insights about how the agency is run, what they prioritize, the long term projects they have undertaken, get a list of new CRS reports, and understand a bit about their interrelationship with Congress. In general terms, it’s a promotional piece for CRS that shows the agency’s work in the best possible light — it’s geared for appropriators — and also includes some useful information about CRS’s operations. Many agencies publish these kinds of promotional reports.
The reports are a snapshot, and on their own don’t provide much information about changes in the agency’s behavior over time. However, if you take the data from reports across many years, you can start to draw conclusions about how their operations have changed. We’ve tried to do just that — but ran into some interesting stumbling blocks. This article is about how hard it is to get information that should be publicly available.
You may have heard of the Congressional Budget Office, the legislative branch agency tasked with advising Congress on the potential economic impact of legislation. In formulating these analyses, CBO may rely on outside experts. The agency has three panels of advisers (Economic, Health, and Health Insurance) composed of experts from academia, the private sector, and elsewhere that provide input on CBO analyses, and CBO also consults with other outside experts.
These outside advisers have the potential to influence CBO’s perspective, which is why the advisers are required to disclose their significant financial interests as a way of surfacing potential conflicts. Until recently, CBO did not publish on its website information about how to review the forms.
Continue reading “CBO’s Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Forms”
The Law Library of Congress (LOC) and the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) have announced a collaborative decade long project to digitize House and Senate reports compiled in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, an official publication dating back to 1817. Traditionally only available in print versions in Federal Depository Libraries throughout the U.S. or for a fee from private vendors, the Serial Set is a complete collection of over 14,000 volumes that contain hundreds of thousands of numbered House and Senate reports and documents. GPO plans to upload the Serial Set volumes in phases and will store the digital files in a certified repository. This effort will allow the public to easily find and download scanned versions of the reports at govinfo.gov.
Continue reading “Going Digital: LOC and GPO Embark On Project to Digitize U.S House and Senate Reports.”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.
Continue reading “The Leg Branch Approps To-Do List for FY 2019”
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:
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”
The likelihood of Congress reinstating a science and technology assessment office is at an all time high, but should such an agency be reconstituted, how should it decide what issues to address?
Congress’s other legislative support agencies — the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office — use various mechanisms to decide where to devote analytic resources. The GAO, for example, prioritizes congressional mandates, then senior leader and committee requests, and then individual member requests, with the practical effect that individual member requests are not usually considered. CRS, by contrast, leaves significant discretion to its analysts concerning which general distribution reports to create, although it does look at frequent requests from members of Congress. (CRS memos, of course, are written at the request of individual members.) Continue reading “How Should the New OTA Decide What To Study?”