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CRS Reports: update on legislation

Here is an update on Senator Lieberman’s Congressional Research Service bill, S.Res. 401. and a comment on it:

Senator pushes alternative to full CRS report access, By Dan Friedman, Government Executive, March 28, 2008.

The story says:

After consultations among committee aides, CRS and others, a prototype will be rolled out “very soon,” according to a CRS spokeswoman and Gantman. The plan aims to balance public needs and the views of “a significant number of members” who oppose Lieberman’s bill due to their belief some CRS reports should remain confidential, Gantman said.

But this approach would disappoint government transparency advocates who say all taxpayer-funded reports should be publicly available. “They should simply move on the Lieberman proposal or something like it and get on with their job,” said Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

CRS Access Update, Speech or Debate Clause, by John Wonderlich, The Open House Project, April 3rd, 2008

John notes that reports of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) are published and searchable on the agencies’ Web sites and are syndicated in RSS and this hasn’t harmed their effectiveness or perceived objectivity at all.

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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