Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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S. Res. 118 – Free CRS Reports
Once again, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) has introduced a resolution in the Senate to put non-confidential Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports online. Heather West at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s “PolicyBeta” blog writes that a solid bi-partisan group of senators have joined Lieberman as co-sponsors. S. Res. 118 is a Senate resolution, which means the Senate Rules Committee and an overall Senate vote are all that’s needed to open the reports to the public — who paid for them to be produced in the first place.CRS is a $100 million funded “think tank” housed in the Library of Congress that researches and writes reports for Congressional lawmakers and their staff on current topics. They include serious and smart analysis, and the reports are well worth reading if you are interested in the hot issues of the day. These reports exist on an internal server on the Hill, but the public is denied access to them. The only way you can get them in by calling a lawmaker’s office and requesting a copy. (Of course, how do you know to ask about a report if its existence isn’t publicly listed someplace…A classic Washington Catch-22.)
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Encouraging More Early Actions
Encouraged by several openness and transparency steps taken by the Obama – Biden transition team, the Center for Democracy & Technology and OMB Watch, both Sunlight grantees, are calling on the new administration to go further and reverse a pair of Bush Administration orders that restrict the public’s right to know under the Freedom of Information Act.
Andrew Noyes at Congress Daily (subscription required, but you can see read it here free thanks to GovernmentExecutive.com) reports that the two groups are impressed by the transition team’s posting transition-related information at Change.gov, and by adding a “Your Seat at the Table” section, where proceedings of meetings and documents shared between Obama’s aides and outside groups are posted online and available for comment.
Open government advocates like CDT and OMB Watch are more than eager to reverse eight opaque years of unaccountability by the Bush Administration, which used executive privilege, hyper classification under the aegis of national security, and stonewalling to further secrecy. “The catalyst was a 2001 memo by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft instructing agencies to withhold information by using such exemptions if an argument could be made to do so,” Noyes writes. In 2002, Andrew Card, then the then White House chief of staff, issued a memo creating a category of “sensitive but unclassified” information to be withheld.
