The release of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports is another example of hacking that is slowly leading to change. CRS is a think tank for Congress that is funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $100 million per year. It produces objective in-depth briefings and high-quality research papers on topical public policy issues. The studies it produces are widely well regarded, and members of Congress and their staffs rely on them as they legislate.
By law, however, CRS can make its reports available only to members of Congress. There are several oft-cited rationales for this policy. First is the idea that by releasing reports directly to the public, CRS would come between lawmakers and their constituents. There is also the concern that if CRS reports were widely disseminated, they would come to be written with a public audience in mind, rather than focusing on congressional needs. Finally, some fear a burden on CRS and congressional staff members who might have to respond to questions and comments generated by publicly available reports. Not surprisingly, several third parties who are not persuaded by these rationales have taken it upon themselves to collect and make the reports available on the Web.
Members of Congress are free to release copies of the reports to citizens if they wish, and they often do so at the request of a constituent. Unfortunately, constituents must first know of a report’s existence before they can request it. There is no public listing of all the available titles, so the fear is that embarrassing reports are never released. Once a report is released, however, one is free to copy and disseminate it because works of the U.S. government are not protected by copyright.
For several years, many organizations, including the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment, have published on their websites hundreds of CRS reports related to their research areas that they have collected over the years. In 2005, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit dedicated to Internet public policy issues, brought the different CRS collections under one roof at OpenCRS.com. There, users can search the combined collections of CDT and partner groups, which total more than 8,000 CRS reports.
More importantly, the site invites users to upload to the online library reports that they have acquired. It also provides a list of CRS reports that are missing from the library and instructions on how citizens can request them from their representatives. CDT acquires this list from a sympathetic but anonymous member of Congress who provides it on a regular basis. Further compromising the secrecy surrounding CRS reports, in February 2009 whistleblower site WikiLeaks.org released 6,780 CRS reports, which it said “represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service electronically available to Congressional offices” (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Change_you_can_download:_a_billion_in_secret_Congressional_reports).
For more than a decade, lawmakers sympathetic to open government have perennially introduced bills or resolutions to make CRS reports public. While these efforts have so far failed, the vast number of CRS reports now available to the public on third-party sites undercut the rationales for a policy of selective release. Citizens have access to a wide array of CRS reports, yet the quality of those reports has not suffered, CRS’s institutional character has not been diminished, and constituent relationships with representatives remain intact. As unofficial collections of CRS reports continue to grow, not only will citizens benefit from access to this information, but the selective release policy will become increasingly untenable and ripe for change.