Advocates call for public access to Congress’s research arm

Forty groups sent a letter to key members of Congress on Monday calling on them to give the public access to reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a major research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill. 

The groups — representing libraries, transparency advocates, tech advocates, scientists and others — said the move would put it in line with similar research arms such as the the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office and the Law Library of Congress. 

{mosads}They said most reports produced by the CRS should be downloadable online with appropriate indexing. 

“Taxpayers provide more than $100 million annually in support of CRS, and yet members of the public often must look to private companies for consistent access,” the groups wrote in the letter. “Some citizens are priced out of these services, resulting in inequitable access to information about government activity that is produced at public expense.”

The letter was sent to the leaders of both chambers’ rules and administration committees.

The Congressional Research Service, housed inside the Library of Congress, was established in 1914. It drafts nonpartisan reports on major policy issues, and it also provides confidential memos, research help or responses to specific questions from congressional staffers. 

Staffers are able to search through the vast database of reports from their congressional network. The database is not open to the public, however, and many reports are only distributed when a lawmaker publishes it or it is unofficially distributed to reporters and other stakeholders.

The groups said they are not calling for those confidential memos to be made public.

Wikileaks released thousands of reports back in 2009, and the Federation of American Scientists catalogs a number of reports that have been publicly released. About 27,000 reports are currently available through a Google search. 

But many of those reports are not up to date and people cannot always find the most recent reports. 

Lawmakers have introduced legislation to open up the database in this Congress and in years past. But CRS has raised its own objections, and the proposal has never gained traction. 

“We value the work of CRS and in no way wish to impede its ability to serve Congress,” according to the letter. “CRS reports already undergo multiple levels of administrative review to ensure they are accurate, nonpartisan, balanced, and well-written. Authors of every CRS product are aware of the likelihood that reports will become publicly available.”