Every year American taxpayers spend more than $100 million to produce original, top-notch policy research for federal lawmakers. The reports issued by the Congressional Research Service are unclassified and nonpartisan—a remarkably useful set of factual distillations of everything from the Pentagon's budget to an election in Haiti.



And the public doesn’t have direct access to them.

In classic Washington fashion, the Congressional Research Service's reports are officially available only to members of Congress and their staff. This doesn’t mean they don’t circulate: They’re shared with the administration, lobbyists, reporters, foreign diplomats and other Beltway insiders. A cottage industry of private firms has gotten in on the action, charging hundreds of dollars per year for subscriptions to tap into their own repositories of CRS reports. The Federation of American Scientists, a private outside group, maintains its own partial online database. But the reports aren’t officially announced or published online.

Now, members of Congress and a coalition that ranges includes good government and tea party groups, as well as academics and former CRS officials, are making a push to change the rules and open up public access to the thousands of CRS reports produced and updated every year.

“We have to recognize the American public is no longer informed by the likes of Cronkite and Murrow,” said Rep. Mike Quigley during a panel discussion in the Rayburn House Office building last week, arguing that the reports are a crucial source of unbiased information. "They're being informed by pundits and ideologues."

A bill co-authored by Quigley (D-Ill.) and Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.) would set up a centralized digital database of CRS reports, making them open and searchable. Last Thursday, advocates released a letter in support of the effort from about two dozen former CRS officials urging key House and Senate congressional leaders to allow for "timely, comprehensive free public access" to the reports.

The CRS has been preparing reports at the request of Congress since 1914, serving as something between a research library and a think tank for the nation's lawmakers. Over the years its research has helped fuel reforms like President Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare overhaul, and the creation of NASA. Though budget cuts and downsizing over the last decade has cut into its mission, and lawmakers have increasingly turned to the office for quick help in answering constituent requests and knocking down internet rumors, the CRS still boasts a staff of about 600 and produces reports that are considered the gold standard for information about American governance.

The issue of their secrecy has been on and off Washington’s radar for decades, and in some ways its persistence is a testament to Washington’s inertia. There’s no official reason the reports aren’t publicized, but a moratorium on direct public access to CRS reports has been in place since the Truman administration. Efforts have been made throughout the years to pass legislation to open them up officially, without much success.

Why are they still under wraps? Quigley blamed “a lack of understanding” among both Democratic and GOP lawmakers, who he said are worried that their confidential memos to CRS staff would get swept up in a new database and become public. That's not the intention of his bill, which would only open up the reports themselves.

It might be hard to imagine just why Congress wants to keep a cloak of secrecy around reports like “Bee Health: The Role of Pesticides” and “Number of Hispanic U.S. Circuit and District Court Judges: Overview and Analysis.” But a hint of what’s really at stake came from Chris Shays, a former Connecticut GOP congressman who had written past versions of the open-CRS measure, who suggested what members are really worried about is the competition down the hallway.

As he explained it, they “like getting access to information that wouldn’t potentially be shared with their opponents.”

"They’re not eager that some candidate can get all this information and come to debates sounding just as articulate," Shays said. "They like the information to be just theirs. They may not even want other members to have it. And if they thought of a really cool question that CRS is going to write up about, they just assume [they] own it.”

Kevin Kosar, a former CRS researcher, said it was unfair to the public that the CRS keeps its front door closed while the reports can legally move through other channels. "You have 20,000 congressional staff who are free to hand out CRS reports like candy,” said Kosar, now a senior fellow and government project director with the conservative R Street Institute, and who has also written for POLITICO. “It’s just that most of America doesn’t know where to look for them.”

A CRS spokesman who attended last week’s panel discussion declined to comment on the push to open up access to the office’s reports.

But in a May 2011 CRS letter to Quigley just released to POLITICO, Mary Mazanec, the acting CRS director at the time, insisted that the public release of reports could harm the office's confidential relationship with Congress. If it knew its work would be public, there would have to be a “fundamental alteration of the CRS mission” that would include having to prepare reports “with a large public audience in mind, and could no longer be focused solely on the needs, agenda and specialized expertise of the congressional audience.”

Mazanec also warned that the public release of the reports would expose CRS researchers to lobbyists and that "could undermine one of the hallmarks of CRS work, namely, that is viewed as objective and immune from such pressures.”

Prospects for actually moving on the Lance-Quigley measure this Congress seem far from certain. In the Senate, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) have previously led unsuccessful bids to change the rules, but haven’t revived their push yet in 2015.

Across the Capitol, House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.), who has primary jurisdiction over the CRS, said in an interview that she's been sidetracked this year by other issues but promised she’d give the legislation her attention soon. “I’ll take a look at it. I know there’s been a lot of talk about that over the years. There might be some of those reports that could be [released]. Others maybe not," she said.

Lance and Quigley said they’d keep trying to elevate the issue with congressional leadership and also push for legislation via the appropriations process. "No one is really blocking it," Lance’s spokesman, John Byers, told POLITICO. "It's more of a function of change is tough."

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