Saw this on Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog at the Washington Monthly. I'll let him lay it out for you:

It's long annoyed me that reports from the Congressional Research Service aren't available to the public. After all, $100 million per year of our tax dollars funds their work. Today, though, I learned about Open CRS, an effort to collect CRS reports and put them in a single searchable archive on the web.

So far they've collected 8,223 CRS reports on subjects ranging from CAFTA to random drug testing. This is a great resource for policy wonks of all stripes. CRS reports are commissioned by congressmen on a wide variety of topics, they're generally nonpartisan and reliable, and most of them run 5-10 pages, which makes them terrific introductions to complex issues.

Someday Congress may decide that CRS itself should collect and index all their reports online, but until they do Open CRS is the best we've got. Highly recommended.

For those who aren't terribly familiar, what exaclty IS the Congressional Research Service and why don't they share? Well...

The Congressional Research Service is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis.

Congress created CRS in order to have its own source of nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues. Indeed, the sole mission of CRS is to serve the United States Congress. CRS has been carrying out this mission since 1914, when it was first established as the Legislative Reference Service.

Renamed the Congressional Research Service by the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, CRS is committed to providing the Congress, throughout the legislative process, comprehensive and reliable analysis, research and information services that are timely, objective, nonpartisan, and confidential, thereby contributing to an informed national legislature.

Prior to the Open CRS projecty, the enterprizing research would have to seek out topic specific databases of these reports made a vailable by a variety of private entities. Many such enterprises who are fed data by the CRS have for some time been taking it upon themselves to provide expanded public access to stingy CRS's findings. For example, the National Library for the Environment (a division of the non-profit National Council for Science and the Environment) has this to say:

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), part of the Library of Congress, prepares its reports for the U.S. Congress. CRS products undergo review for accuracy and objectivity and contain nontechnical information that can be very useful to people interested in environmental policy. CRS does not itself provide these documents to the general public. Although CRS documents are prepared specifically for Congress and not widely distributed, their distribution is not protected by law or copyright. NCSE is committed to expanding, maintaining and updating its database of reports, making them available and searchable for the public.

Via their website the NLE provides an advanced search page that access some 1700 or so CRS reports relating to environmental quality issues. You can find it here.

Open CRS provides access to the NLE collection as well as many others, with the goal of disseminating much needed information and just generally providing the American public with much better bang for their buck:

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.

A tremendous tool for researchers of all stripes. We wish'em luck.

-- MDT

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