Congressional Research Service Reports Now Officially Publicly Available

from the huge-news dept

For many, many years we've been writing about the ridiculousness of the Congressional Research Service's reports being kept secret. If you don't know, CRS is a sort of in-house think tank for Congress, that does, careful, thoughtful, non-partisan research on a variety of topics (sometimes tasked by members of Congress, sometimes of its own volition). The reports are usually quite thorough and free of political nonsense. Since the reports are created by the federal government, they are technically in the public domain, but many in Congress (including many who work at CRS itself) have long resisted requests to make those works public. Instead, we were left with relying on members of Congress themselves to occasionally (and selectively) share reports with the public, rather than giving everyone access to the reports.

Every year or so, there were efforts made to make all of that research available to the public, and it kept getting rejected. Two years ago, two members of Congress agreed to share all of the reports they had access to with a private site put together by some activists and think tanks, creating EveryCRSReport.com, which was a useful step forward. At the very least, we've now had two years to show that, when these reports are made public, the world does not collapse (many people within CRS feared that making the reports public would lead to more political pressure).

Earlier this year, in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, there was a nice little line item to officially make CRS reports publicly available.

And, this week, it has come to pass. As announced by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, there is now an official site to find CRS reports at crsreports.congress.gov. It appears that the available catalog is still limited, but they're hoping to expand backwards to add older reports to the system (a few quick test searches only shows fairly recent reports). But all new reports will be added to the database.

The result is a new public website for CRS reports based on the same search functionality that Congress uses – designed to be as user friendly as possible – that allows reports to be found by common keywords. We believe the site will be intuitive for the public to use and will also be easily updated with enhancements made to the congressional site in the future.

Moving forward, all new or updated reports will be added to the website as they are made available to Congress. The Library is also working to make available the back catalog of previously published reports as expeditiously as possible.

This is a big deal. The public pays over $100 million every year to have this research done, and all of it is in the public domain. Starting now, we can actually read most of it, and don't need to rely on leaks to find this useful, credible research.

Filed Under: congressional research service, crs, library of congress, public domain, research, think tank

Congress Continues To Withhold Congressional Research Service Documents From The Public

from the no-un-spun-insight-for-you,-citizens dept

The Congressional Research Service conducts research for Congress on a multitude of topics. This information is (theoretically) used to guide policy decisions. The research itself is (again, theoretically) valuable, considering it's free of partisan rhetoric and biased conclusions. This lack of bias and rhetoric helps explain the following actions:

First, Congress has again -- for the third year straight -- refused to increase the office's budget. Congress chalks this up to its seldom-seen sense of budgetary restraint.

In the new spending bill, the House Committee ominously rejected a CRS request for a $5 million budget increase in 2016, and allocated $107 million, the same as the 2015 level.

"The Legislative Branch must set itself as an example for fiscal restraint while continuing to serve the Nation. This bill will require strict fiscal discipline on the part of all congressional offices and all agency heads in the Legislative Branch," the report said.

Fiscal restraint is great, but it's always a good idea to take a closer look at the areas Congress decides to apply it. (There aren't many, so it shouldn't take long…) Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' (FAS) Secrecy News blog notes that Congress doesn't have much use for unbiased research.

[CRS reports are] the kind of in-depth policy analysis that can only be helpful to those whose policy preferences are not predetermined by ideology or affiliation.

Who wants to pay (via taxpayers) for research that doesn't agree with the requester's point of view? Not Congress. So, the CRS will have to make do with the same budget it's had for three years straight. And while it struggles to meet the demands of representatives' requests for research, the CRS will also have to pitch in with the arduous task of answering requests from constituents on behalf of Congress members.

What is often deemed most useful is having CRS analysts assist congressional staff in responding to constituent mail, including eccentric or demented requests for information.

Like this request, which resulted in the CRS losing an analyst.

Why is the US Postal Service "stockpiling ammunition"? That sort of question helped lead CRS analyst Kevin Kosar to leave his job, he explained in an article in the Washington Monthly earlier this year ("Why I Quit the Congressional Research Service," Jan/Feb 2015).

This is where Congress feels CRS's limited resources (that it limited) are best deployed -- not providing clear, factual insight into policy issues.

Now, on to the second point. This research is crafted to guide policymaking -- policies that affect the public. This research, like everything else on Capitol Hill, is paid for with tax dollars. It's essentially public domain material. And yet, Congress continues to instruct the CRS to withhold this research from the public that paid for it.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) will continue to be barred from releasing its reports to the public, the House Appropriations Committee said yesterday in its report on legislative branch appropriations for the coming year.

"The bill contains language which provides that no funds in the Congressional Research Service can be used to publish or prepare material to be issued by the Library of Congress unless approved by the appropriate committees," the House report said.

And so, the research remains locked up. Constituents can request this information from their representatives, but they are under no obligation to produce the documents. The same public that paid for the research once now spends its own money maintaining archives of any CRS reports they manage to acquire. FAS hosts hundreds of liberated reports. Wikileaks has posted nearly 7,000 CRS reports to its archives as well.

The CRS itself is no transparency angel itself. It, too, has opposed legislation aimed at making the reports directly available to the general public. It's been more than a decade since any effort to free these made it to a vote (a resolution was introduced in 2012 but went nowhere), but in an internal memo obtained by FAS, the CRS claimed (among other things) that this would unduly influence the researchers, if not the research itself.

Over time, CRS products might come to be written with a large public audience in mind and could no longer be focused solely on congressional needs.

However, another listed concern seems to indicate the service is OK with allowing Congress members to "translate" its reporting for American citizens.

The danger of placing CRS, a support agency, in an intermediate position responding directly to constituents instead of preserving the direct relationship between constituents and their elected representatives. This threatens the dialog on policy issues between Members and their constituents that was envisioned by the Constitution.

This seems like a legitimate complaint until you realize exactly what's happening here. CRS provides mostly-unbiased research -- something citizens could use to better inform themselves about legislative/world issues. If it allowed these reports out into the wild, Congress members would be unable to twist the findings to fit their own personal agendas or conform with the party line. This "direct relationship" with constituents means molding the data to match the message -- something that's crucial to winning the support of influential figures and cash-heavy contributors. A CRS report out in the open undercuts spin attempts. By not pushing for the release of unbiased research to the general public, the CRS is complicit in allowing politics -- rather than data -- to guide decision-making, while keeping the electorate from being fully informed.

Filed Under: congress, congressional research service, crs, funding, information sharing, public domain

CRS Report Withheld By USTR Confirms That ACTA Language Is Quite Questionable

from the revealed dept

We're happy to announce that we've been able to get our hands on the -- until now -- secret Congressional Research Service analysis of ACTA. You can see it embedded below, and it shows that the language used by the USTR in ACTA has lots of weasel words that let them claim it doesn't impact US law, but the interpretations of the language could very much impact US law. First some background.

A few weeks back, we mentioned that KEI was appealing the fact that the USTR was refusing to release a Congressional Research Service report on the legality of ACTA, claiming that it couldn't release the report because it was controlled by Congress. However, there is little evidence to support that. Not surprisingly, the USTR's response to KEI's appeal was to again deny the FOIA request to release the report, claiming:

The [USTR FOIA Appeals] Committee undertook a comprehensive review of the circumstance of the creation of the document at issue and the conditions under which it was sent to USTR, including through statements provided by members of USTR's Office and Congressional Affairs and Office of Intellectual Property and Innovation. The Committee concludes that Congress intended to retain control over this document and that it is not an agency record subject to FOIA.

What struck us as odd about the whole thing was why KEI was focused on the USTR, rather than Senator Wyden. So we asked Senator Wyden to release the report, and about an hour ago, his office sent us the CRS memo, in slightly redacted form. The redactions are around a specific issue relating to ongoing negotiations over the degree to which patents are covered by ACTA -- the one key sticking point in the remaining negations. The US wants to include a footnote that effectively lets it ignore a key point about patent injunctions, because US law has certain prohibitions on injunctions, and the current ACTA text suggests that all signatories would have to offer up injunctions as a possibility in those cases.

As you read through the document, however, what becomes clear is that nothing is very clear in ACTA, and there are all sorts of weasel words and poorly-defined aspects to the drafting. What that means is that it all depends on the interpretation. If certain sections are interpreted one way, then ACTA clearly conflicts with US law. If they're interpreted in a more permissive fashion, then the US can walk the tightrope and comply with ACTA without having to change US law. But the problem is that it's not at all clear. This leads ACTA supporters to be in a position to say, "well, it doesn't require changes to US law," and then not have to deal with the issue that, down the road, lobbyists (and other countries) will inevitably point to language in ACTA and push the US to change its laws in order to comply. That's the really nefarious part about all of this.

The memo also notes that while technically Congress is not supposed to be restrained by ACTA, the practical realities may be different:

Congress may not feel compelled to take into account the requirements of an agreement that it had no formal role in approving. On the other hand, it may well be that Members of Congress might be reluctant to consider legislative approaches that would alter federal law in a manner that might make the United States in default of its ACTA obligations. The seriousness of such a concern may turn on the extent to which the United States may be held accountable for ignoring its ACTA obligations, or how successful the United States is in convincing other ACTA Parties of its compliance with the ACTA commitments even with such legislation.

In other words, if the US can weasel its way around complaints from other countries and industry lobbyists, it might still be able to fix broken parts of copyright, trademark and patent law... but most folks in Congress probably don't want to bother with that fight. More simply: technically, ACTA probably doesn't constrain Congress, but the political reality is that it absolutely does constrain Congress. But we knew that already.

Most of the other concerns are specific to the language choices used in ACTA. For example, in this section, the CRS researchers note how the drafters try to distinguish rights from enforcement in ways that might not be reasonable or even possible:

Another initial provision in the draft tax declares: "This Agreement shall be without prejudice to provisions governing the availability, acquisition, scope, and maintenance of intellectual property rights contained in a Party's law." Note that this language refers to intellectual property rights (as opposed to remedies for violation of those rights). Thus, this provision allows a Party to have domestic laws that contain exceptions, limitations, and conditions concerning the "availability, acquisition, scope, and maintenance" of IPR. It does not, however, appear to apply to a Party's domestic laws that provide exceptions to the remedies that are available to intellectual property holders that seek to enforce their IPR. Yet it may be difficult in certain circumstances to draw a distinction between a Party's domestic laws that establish rights and those that provide remedies for violation of those rights; if the domestic law clearly concerns the latter, then this provision does not appear to be relevant. For example, a law that specifies that "injunctive relief is not available..." for certain acts of infringement, appears more clearly to be a limitation on available remedies. However, a law that specifies that "it is not an act of infringement to" perform a specific action could be considered a limitation on remedies, or it could also be regarded as an exception, limitation, or condition regarding the availability and scope of IPR.

Really, what becomes clear in all of this is just what a dreadful document ACTA is. It's vague in all sorts of important places, in order to give the USTR and ACTA supporters wiggle room to claim that it is in line with US law, but allow folks in other countries to claim that the US is not in line with ACTA. Agreeing to ACTA is a disaster in waiting. Even if it doesn't technically constrain Congress, it's going to tie us up in a series of ridiculous fights over compliance, and the pressure will clearly be on the US to interpret the provisions in ACTA in the most stringent ways (necessitating changes to US law) to avoid fights over whether or not we've lived up to our "international obligations."

Filed Under: acta, congress, crs, restrictions, ron wyden, ustr

USTR Refuses To Release Congressional Research Service Study On Legality Of ACTA

from the why-is-this-kept-secret? dept

We've talked about how ridiculous it is that the government keeps Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports secret. The organization, which is widely respected and tends to do thorough, objective and useful research, technically produces reports that are in the public domain. However, the recipients of those reports (usually members of Congress or other government employees) often don't want to let those documents out for that very reason. If you're pushing for a certain law, and CRS research proves that there are problems with it, you don't want that info to get out. Of course, if we had intellectually honest politicians (stop laughing!), they would not just publish the research, but would actually use it to guide some of their policy making decisions.

Back in October, you may recall that Senator Ron Wyden, one of the very few elected officials to actually understand and to worry about the implications of ACTA, asked the CRS to study ACTA to see how it would impact US law. That report has been delivered to the USTR, and KEI filed a FOIA request to see the document. However, the USTR has refused to provide the document. The USTR really seems to take a "secrecy first, transparency never" view on all things ACTA, doesn't it? It certainly makes you wonder what's in that report, doesn't it?

KEI is now appealing the rejection, claiming that the USTR's explanation for denying the request is simply not supported by the law. The USTR claims that it can't hand out the document, because it belongs to CRS. This is simply incorrect, as KEI noted in its reply. Of course, it's also unclear why Senator Wyden's office doesn't release the document itself, but the feeling there is that he doesn't want to upset the USTR either.

Filed Under: acta, crs, transparency, ustr

Ask Congress To Make Public Domain Congressional Research Service's Reports Public

from the yes,-please dept

A couple of years ago, we wrote about how the Congressional Research Service's reports were technically public domain, but were often hidden from the public by a Congress, who doesn't want you to see the CRS reports. That's because CRS is known for publishing research that is non-partisan, extremely credible and useful. And, of course, our elected officials in Congress don't want that sort of information out there. They prefer the information that's been spun to their political advantage first. Wikileaks has been able to publish some CRS reports, but a ton of CRS stuff still remains hidden, even though it's technically public domain.

A bunch of organizations are trying to change that. 38 groups have sent a letter to Congress asking them to open up and release CRS research. The full letter is included after the jump, but this is a proposal that really should be supported by the public. Check it out, and if you agree, add your voices to those pushing to finally open up this valuable resource to the public who paid for it.

Filed Under: congress, congressional research service, crs, public domain, research