There’s a small army of researchers hard at work on public policy projects. But until now, most of their work has stayed hidden from the U.S. taxpayers who fund it.
Now that’s changing. Thanks to the work of Open CRS, the efforts of the U.S. Congressional Research Service – which might otherwise never make it outside of a Senator’s or Representative’s office – are seeing the light of day.
As the OpenCRS folks put it,
American taxpayers spend nearly $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a “think tank” that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology through the cooperation of several organizations and collectors of CRS Reports, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.
CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report. A number of libraries and non-profit organizations have sought to collect as many of the released reports as possible. Open CRS is a centralized utility that brings together these collections to search.
Open CRS asks its users to ask their member of Congress to give them specific reports that are still missing from its collection, in PDF format. (Right now, they’re interested in a report on paperwork reduction related to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.) Once a user gets a report, they upload it to the Open CRS web site, where it’s catalogued and added to the collection.
As of right now, Open CRS offers access 8,223 reports – all free, all downloadable. They’re a policy wonk’s dream, with titles like Pension Issues Cloud Postal Reform Debate; Federally Mandated Random Drug Testing in Professional Athletics: Constitutional Issues; and Transit Reauthorization in the 109th Congress.
Open CRS’ ultimate goal is to convince the Congressional Research Service to make its non-confidential reports available to the public.
(Incidentally, the Canadian analogy is probably the Library of Parliament’s collection of research and analysis papers. It’s completely online already. Cue smug Canadian grin, and happy July 1st.)
Update: Marnie Webb notes the handy-dandy RSS feeds that Open CRS offers. Tr?®s cool.
