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CRS reports for the people

The Center for Democracy and Technology has started a new Web site, OpenCRS, that aims to make Congressional Research Service Reports more available.

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.

The site further notes that, “Unfortunately, there is no systematic way to obtain all CRS reports. Because of this, not all reports appear on the Open CRS web site. CDT beleives that it would be far preferable for Congress to make available to the public all CRS Reports.”

The site provides RSS feeds for Recent reports and Recently Added reports.

RSS feed of recent reports:
http://www.opencrs.com/syndication/recent.xml
RSS feed of recently added reports:
http://www.opencrs.com/syndication/recentlyadded.xml

It also provides a page of links to other CRS report collections and RSS feeds for those.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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