Modernization

We’ve worked to modernize Congress by giving it a capacity to examine and modernize its own operations and to push for technology innovation.

We have done this through building entities inside the Congress, such as the House Modernization Committee and the Congressional Data Task Force, and then by collaborating with those entities once established.

We were deeply involved in the creation of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (also known as “ModCom”), kept it alive beyond its original scope, and testified before the committee to help shape its more than 200 recommendations, some of which are currently implemented and many are in the process of being implemented. When the Committee sunsetted at the end of the 117th Congress, we successfully made the case for its work to continue as a new Committee on House Administration Subcommittee.

We were among original members of a cohort of organizations that met with and supported the ModCom, and we made it clear it had to be unicameral in the House because we knew the Senate would not move at the speed of innovation. During its lifespan, we provided analyses, testimony, and educated the members and the media about its impact. Along with our cohort, we elevated the ModCom’s work and helped contextualize it within the larger congressional ecosystem. We also made the case for its continued existence when it was going to run out of funding.

ModCom has been one of the main vehicles for accountability measures in Congress — and a highly effective one, as its implementation record indicates. The committee adopted and forwarded dozens of our policy recommendations, including to expand science and technology expertise at legislative support agencies, the creation of the House Intern Resource Office, and new structured data to improve disclosure and tracking of the influence of individual lobbyists.

Technology Modernization for Greater Transparency

Modernization, transparency, and accountability go hand in hand in hand. We’re fostering a collaborative culture to improve Congress’s ability to meet its legislative and oversight obligations by marrying transparency with technology.

Congress should have available to it — and available to civil society — enough data and technological tools that it can easily access and use its own information and not have to purchase information about congressional activities from the private sector.

Better technology in Congress makes for more efficient policymaking. Unfortunately, Congress let itself fall behind in its technology infrastructure while it self-inflicted budget cuts that reduced staffing levels for decades. We are helping congressional insiders and outside technologists think big together to transform its use of technology and how legislative data can be used in new and creative ways to save congressional staffers’ time and taxpayer dollars.

This helps turn staffers into super staffers by giving them better tools. For years, Congress hamstrung its operations by relegating its historically limited number of staff to performing rote work rather than representational or legislative duties. With woefully inadequate technology, staff were spending too much time on legislative office drudgery like comparing bills by eyeballing text or manually entering constituent information into databases. Staff shouldn’t be wasting their time with tasks that computers can do better. They have more important things to do.

This is our vision: Imagine if a staffer could pick a bill and see all the related IG, CRS, GAO, and CBO reports, all the committee reports and amendments, the votes at the various stages, the Dear Colleague letters, statements from the administration, and the floor speeches. If they’re following a particular issue, we’re working toward a day when they could simply enter a few key terms in a search engine and receive alerts whenever any matching documents are found. Think of all the time that would save — and all the knowledge it would put at the hands of overworked congressional staff.

Or what if they could push a button to see how an amendment would change a bill or a bill would change the law. The new Comparative Print Project (available to all House staff behind the House firewall at compare.house.gov), a project we’ve helped foster, makes this a reality. We’re also helping to examine how to repurpose newly liberated congressional data to provide a dashboard-like view into Congress’s vital statistics on staff pay, retention, the movement of legislation, and lobbying data. Imagine being able to identify at a glance the unlikely allies who might join you in co-sponsoring legislation.

Data transparency combined with improved technology makes all of this possible. 

Congress has continued to make progress on transparency on a number of fronts. In recent years, the data publication initiatives have included the online publishing of

• bills in formats that support reuse of the data by others;
• committee schedules, documents, and videos;
• an online House phone directory;
• the bills and amendments scheduled for a floor vote in the House;
• the Statements of Disbursements;
• the US Code as structured data;
• the joint meetings calendar;
• public access to CRS reports (although not the underlying data); and
• bills (but not resolutions), which are typically available online 72 hours prior to a floor vote.

Meanwhile, the Clerk has a non-partisan repository of committee documents at docs.house.gov. There’s now a Whistleblower Ombudsman, and the House has continued its longstanding efforts to draft legislation in the structured data format XML.

Because of these technological and disclosure upgrades, it is increasingly possible for people to meaningfully participate in the legislative and oversight process. They can better understand what Congress is doing, educate themselves about the issues before Congress, and provide meaningful input. In addition, the disparity in power between expensive lobbyists and their public sector counterparts is growing at a slower rate, although there’s a lot more that can be done here.

We build bridges between outside technologists and congressional institutionalists.

Along with the Foundation for American Innovation, we co-lead the left-right Congressional Data Coalition. This group instigated the creation and sustained the development of the newly minted Congressional Data Task Force. 

What began more than a dozen years ago as an informal gathering of civil society and disparate government staff who were united in their mission to improve how bills were made available online is now an official operation of the Legislative branch with an expanded mission to improve the transparency of congressional operations and legislative documents.

The Task Force brought together many of the institutional players inside Congress and across the Legislative branch. Many didn’t know each other that well, others had been quietly working behind the scenes, and the Task Force gave them a mandate to collaborate. So they started meeting, and they met with us, and we presented our request. And they agreed to it — and implemented public access to legislative data — i.e., bill summaries, status information, and text. But they kept meeting with each other, and with the public. They continue to meet and collaborate to this day.

Our continued work with the Congressional Data Task Force and the Congressional Data Coalition, and our close relationships and collaborations with the House Digital Services and other people inside government updating and redefining how Congress deploys technology platforms like the Comparative Print Project, ensures their work is user centered.

The Congressional Data Task Force builds and models technology that is then brought inside the congressional ecosystem. Due to the work of some Task Force members, Congress recently began introducing bills electronically and announced a range of technology upgrades, including:

Congress must be able to access information about itself.

Congress produces an enormous amount of information, but access to legislative information is distributed unevenly. Experienced political actors and entrenched lobbyists have a legislative edge few can match.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) notoriously does not apply to the Legislative branch — but, as the FOIA Advisory Committee observes, that doesn’t mean a common law right of access doesn’t exist for Legislative branch documents.

We’ve urged for the creation of a congressional directory, and for a set of reforms ensuring Congress is able to access its own data. We’re also involved in a multi-year effort to make Congressional Research Service reports freely available to the public. All members of Congress should have direct access to the corpus of these reports upon demand, and yet there is no way for them to know what report titles even exist. Similarly, all members of the public, not just deep-pocketed groups who can afford to pay for third-party subscription services, should have equal access to these valuable resources from Congress’s internal think tank that shape understanding of myriad public policy topics.