For you who might be unaware,
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis. ... CRS reports are not made directly available to members of the public. Instead, the public must request individual reports from their Senators and Representatives in Congress, or purchase them from private vendors such as Penny Hill Press. A limited number of reports have been made freely available on the web ...
Recently, the CRS director restricted even further CRS report distribution.
Congresswoman Pelosi ... Senator Reid ... Can you answer this question?
- Why, oh why, should the public have to pay Penny Hill for access to these tax-payer funded reports?
You might be unfamiliar with CRS, at least directly, but these reports often form the basis for news reporting and thoughtful blogging.
In fact, searching the past year's stories and diaries for Crongressional Research Service comes up with 111 hits from such Kossacks as Smintheus on wiretapping; SusanHu on war cost; Meteor Blades linking to a CRS Air Cargo Security Report; etc ... Searching CRS bumps this to 51 stories and diaries over the past year or the 310 comments.
In February, Kagro X diaried A peek at "Congress' Brain", based on The Washington Post article, Information, Please: Watchdog Groups, Some Lawmakers Say Congressional Reports Should Be Made Public, to discuss CRS and the need to make their reports more public.
Deep inside the Library of Congress, 500 researchers pound out the secret intelligence Congress uses to make law.
Legislators request 6,000 Congressional Research Service reports a year, on weapons systems and farm subsidies, prescription prices and energy use. Together, they offer what lobbyists and industry want most: clues to what's next on the Hill.
For years, open-government groups have fought to make the reports public, and for years, many lawmakers have kept them under wraps. Or so they thought.
There has long been a movement to make reports public, more open, and not available only through purchase or through currying favor with a Member of Congress.
Rather than opening up over the past month, the situation has gotten worse.
According to The Washington Post,
This week, Congressional Research Service chief Daniel P. Mulhollan issued a memo to all staffers in the service, known as Congress's think tank. From now on, he wrote, CRS researchers will require a supervisor's approval before giving any CRS report to a "non-congressional."
What is a 'Non-congressional'?
fellow researchers in "U.S. government entities and nongovernmental entities, the media and foreign governments, like embassies."
CRS researchers are forbidden from doing the professional thing, of sending out their products to the people they cited or asked for support when writing work. Even more aggressively, they are forbidden from sharing their work from researchers across the government.
Who does this serve?
Clearly not the taxpayer. Clearly not effective governance and learning across the government. (Again, not the taxpayer.)
Who does it serve?
How can this be justified with a straight face?
End this travesty of closed governance ... NOW!
I've written Pelosi, Reid, my senators, and my "Representative".
Will you?