Accountability and Oversight
Government must be accountable.
Everyone should have equal access to high-quality information about what the government is doing in their name. Disclosure of public information empowers the public and civil society to hold power to account. Disclosure also allows Congress to properly oversee the Executive branch.
We work to promote government transparency and improved oversight in coalition with civil society partners, and in collaboration with the Transparency Caucus (through our Advisory Committee on Transparency) and the OpenGov Roundtable.
FOIA and Beyond
We’re expanding public access to public records by improving implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. There are practical ways to improve FOIA compliance — especially relevant given the current FOIA backlogs. For example, we’ve led coalition efforts to compel the Judiciary Committee to conduct better oversight of federal agencies’ compliance with FOIA. We’ve also worked to promote the proactive disclosure of information so that it’s not necessary to file a FOIA request to find what you want.
We work to empower oversight by the First Branch by securing congressional access to Executive branch information.
We support legislation requiring transparency of legal opinions by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), with some exceptions for classified material. OLC opinions are afforded the force of law, but they’re routinely withheld from Congress and the public. This is a problem nurtured by presidents of both parties who have aggregated to themselves the power to issue secret interpretations of the law through the OLC.
We lead coalition efforts to compel disclosure of OLC opinions. As a start, OLC should publish an index of all opinions so the public may be aware of their existence.
We also successfully pressed for passage of the Periodically Listing Updates to Management (PLUM) Act, legislation requiring annual updates to the Plum book, a registry of over 9,000 political appointees in the Executive and Legislative branches. Now, it’s possible to know which positions are vacant, which ones are filled, and by whom.
The congressional support agencies provide key legislative support to Congress, yet often cannot obtain information from the Executive branch. We’ve called for Congress to address this bureaucratic hurdle by creating a framework for Legislative branch agencies to request and obtain information from the Executive branch — a form MOU.
We advocate for specific legislation that promotes public disclosure aobut personnel, appropriations, and more. Beyond the PLUM Act, recently-passed legislation we support includes a law requiring federal agencies to publish their budget requests online and as data.
We work to improve oversight of Congress — and Congress’s power to conduct oversight. Along with our allies at the Foundation for American Innovation (formerly the Lincoln Network), we tout the remarkable return on investments in the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the entity responsible for auditing Congress itself. We further bolster GAO by recommending further investments in the agency.
We consistently support strengthening the offices of the Inspectors General: the built-in watchdog ensuring good governance of federal agencies. Inspectors General save taxpayer dollars and protect constitutional rights; they should be granted adequate funding and greater independence from the agencies they audit. We successfully prompted the creation of a central website that has most of the IG reports in one place.
Oversight of the Executive branch is one of the primary congressional functions — but one that is falling by the wayside.
We recommend strengthening oversight in four main ways:
- strengthening the subpoena and contempt powers of Congress;
- strengthening the Office of General Counsel;
- reforming the staff clearances system to afford all members adequate legislative support; and
- bolstering GAO’s powers.
Whistleblower Protection
No oversight system is infallible. That’s why we need to create avenues for whistleblowers to report potential malfeasance without threat of retaliation.
We’re calling on the Senate to establish a Senate Whistleblower Ombuds Office to support the needs of Senate staff in working with whistleblowers. This will ensure better support of whistleblowers, who often do not know how to approach Congress with their concerns as well as congressional offices, who often do not know how to properly protect those communications.
We also frequently direct congressional staff to the excellent whistleblower resources produced by the House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds through the First Branch Forecast.
Congressional Staff Security Clearances
Not all members who serve on intelligence committees have dedicated staff equipped to advise them on sensitive matters, which undermines Congress’s ability to legislate or conduct effective oversight of the Executive branch.
Unfortunately, most staff are not eligible to obtain Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances.
We’ve been in a years-long effort to fix this problem. Here’s why: Without TS/SCI clearances, congressional staff cannot access important information, ask probing questions of intelligence briefers, nor have fully informed conversations with members of Congress. Very few members of the House have dedicated staff at the TS/SCI level.
This is especially concerning when considering potential votes to declare a national emergency or authorize the use of military force.
We were deeply involved in persuading the Senate to recently update its policies to allow for TS/SCI clearances for one aide in each personal office. This was a hard fought, multi-year effort.
But, the House does not allow any personal office staffers to have a TS/SCI clearance, only allows a comparative handful of committee staffers to have those clearances, and doesn’t provide staff designees to members serving on the House Intelligence Committee.
We’re keeping the pressure on for the House to adopt a similar process as in the Senate.
Learn more about congressional staff clearances in this primer we published with our friends at the Project on Government Oversight.