Free the CRS! Government transparency.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Citings - Congressional Research Service - Brief article

CALL THE Congressional Research Service (CRS), and a chirpy automated assistant offers five options to start your data search. Three of them are for members of Congress or their employees, and they are free. The rest of them are for the rest of us, and they're not quite free. In fact, if you want to use the papers compiled by Congress' think tank, you have to shell out hundreds of dollars to Lexis-Nexis or another company that buys access to them. A one-year subscription to Gallery Watch, which claims to have the largest collection of reports, costs $4,000.

This exclusivity puzzles open-government activists, since taxpayers pony up $100 million every year for CRS research. You could blame bureaucratic inertia; according to Wired's Luke O'Brien, the CRS itself buys a subscription from Gallery Watch instead of archiving its own work. The Center for Democracy and Technology works around the problem by collecting CRS reports from people who have purchased them and posting them at opencrs.com. But that's a stopgap measure.

"Congress members already have a fully...