Critics pan plan to publish congressional research

WASHINGTON— Government transparency advocates were thrilled last spring when Congress ordered its in-house think tank to publicly release its reports.

Now, groups that lobbied for years to end the secrecy surrounding the Congressional Research Service say the website scheduled to launch in September would leave out crucial documents and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than it should.

“When they finish the process that they outline, they will not have solved the problem Congress told them to solve,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress Action and a former CRS attorney. “They are supposed to make all non-confidential CRS reports available on their website in a timely way.”

Schuman laid out his concerns Thursday in a blog post co-authored with R Street Institute Vice President Kevin Kosar—a former CRS researcher—and govTrack.us founder Josh Tauberer. They based their criticism on a May Library of Congress implementation plan, which they also released on the website legbranch.com.

The Library of Congress, the agency that oversees the Congressional Research Service, projected in that document it would launch the website on Sept. 18, the day before the statutory deadline, with 500 reports that are relevant to issues currently before Congress. It would then publish batches of 400 reports every month until the spring of 2019, when all so-called “active reports,” defined as, “current and relative to the legislative agenda,” would be online. The project would cost an estimated $1.5 million.

Representatives of the Library of Congress and congressional offices that directed it to undertake the project did not respond to requests for comment.