The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age: Politicians aren't putting public docs on the Net, and no one seems to care.
A political consultant walks into a bar in Washington, DC, and notices that the TV is playing a closed-captioned news broadcast. In one of those moments that give DC its wonkish tang, he has an inspiration: Why not use technology to make Congress more accessible to the public?
So, in April 1999, Philip Angell, then head of corporate communications for Monsanto, started thinking about congressional hearings - the year-round pageant of experts, lawyers, government officials, lobbyists, academics, and miscellaneous citizen-advocates who testify before House and Senate committees. Although some hearings are empty exercises in showboating, the bulk are noteworthy, particularly those that involve pending legislation, appropriations, nominations, and oversight of government agencies. Angell knew it was often difficult to attend the hearings that matter: The committee rooms are not large; most congressional leaders couldn't care less about making life easier for spectators; and flocks of lobbyists and reporters descend upon the meatiest sessions, sometimes paying line-standers to reserve spots. C-Span airs a limited number of hearings - some live, some after the fact. And, upholding bureaucratic tradition, the committees and subcommittees themselves don't release printed transcripts for many months. Even though most hearings are officially "public," it's not easy for citizens to tap in. Surely, Angell thought, technology could open some doors.
He was right. This June, Angell launched HearingRoom.com (www.hearingroom.com), a Web site that uses voice recognition technology to deliver real-time streaming text and audio of congressional hearings. In the 14 months since his brainstorm, he accomplished what Congress has not even bothered to try. But Angell is a businessman, not a public policy do-gooder; he intends to make a buck. In fact, he's estimating revenue of $3 million in the first year alone. A subscription to his service costs $1,000 to $15,000 a year - hardly a for-the-people price. Naturally, his first two dozen customers are lobbyists, corporations, and media organizations. The average political junkie is still locked out.
Angell's venture underscores a profound failure of Congress. Why is it that the powers that be on Capitol Hill - the people who write our laws and who make up what is supposed to be the federal government's most accessible arm - have not enthusiastically embraced the Internet and put their day-to-day work online? Angell created a relatively simple operation using off-the-shelf tools and a modest budget. He drew on existing voice-rec technology - Lernout & Hauspie's Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional software. He raised about $850,000 in seed money - a tiny sum compared with congressional appropriations. And he easily obtained permission to wire Senate and House committee rooms with audio feed lines. None of this was beyond Congress' means, but all of it was light-years beyond its imagination.
"Congress could do this if it wanted, and there is nothing standing in the way," says Angell, who could be put out of business tomorrow if legislators flip the right switches. But that is unlikely to happen, despite the fact that Congress promised to get wired six years ago.
Days after the Republicans snatched control of the House of Representatives in 1994, Newt Gingrich, the speaker-to-be, declared he would push Congress into the information age. Gingrich saw himself as a revolutionary poised to remake the government and renew American society. He pledged to create a system that would allow the entire country to have electronic access to congressional documents. With typically melodramatic flair, he promised to change "the entire flow of information and the entire quality of knowledge in the country."
There was certainly room for improvement on the Hill. At the time, only a few congressional documents - such as the daily Congressional Record and the original text of selected bills - were available online. Gingrich knew that Congress could do much more. Announcing that he would recruit futurist Alvin Toffler and various high tech firms, he vowed that "we will change the rules of the House to require that all documents ... be filed electronically ... so that information is available to every citizen in the country at the same moment it is available to the highest-paid Washington lobbyist." It was a fresh and forward-looking plan.
Unfortunately, it didn't go very far. Lobbyists still have better access than any plugged-in commoner. Members of Congress, who in '94 were amazingly un-wired as a group, have learned to make use of the Net, but mostly in the interest of campaigning, managing PR, or scoring partisan political points. Everyone remembers how quickly the House Judiciary Committee posted Kenneth Starr's salacious report on the Monica Lewinsky mess and other impeachment-related documents, many of which embarrassed Bill Clinton. And every member of Congress now has a self-glorifying Web site. Even so, much of Congress' basic work cannot be accessed on the Net. And these days, there is little rah-rah talk on the Hill about changing that.
For several years, public-access advocates have been grumbling about this unfulfilled promise. Leading the pack is Gary Ruskin, the 35-year-old director of the Congressional Accountability Project, an organization founded by Ralph Nader. Sitting in his dark Dupont Circle office beneath soot-stained windows and tall, unsteady stacks of old newspapers and books, Ruskin ticks off a list of vital information that Congress has failed to post on the Web. A top item: working drafts of legislation, the new versions of bills that emerge as they crawl through subcommittees and committees. You won't find these updates posted on Thomas, the main congressional Web site (thomas.loc.gov). This material is often available in hard copy to the lobbyists who prowl the halls of Congress. But these working versions are rarely obtainable in electronic form. No committee chair has made this a priority, so if you're unable to visit Capitol Hill and find a cooperative aide, you're out of luck.
"I have yet to meet a member of Congress who supports placing this stuff online," Ruskin says. "There are reasons why members might want to keep bills secret or quiet sometimes. They can hope things like favors done for contributors or boondoggles or waste are not discovered easily. But there's a basic question here: How can citizens be expected to petition their Congress knowledgeably without access to the relevant legislative documents?"
Thomas lacks mountains of other useful information, including Congressional Research Service reports, which are not routinely posted. The CRS, a nonpartisan, highly regarded research outfit housed in the Library of Congress, has published roughly 3,000 studies on a variety of subjects - tritium production, mastectomies, food safety, leaking underground storage tanks, global warming, and the Internet, to name a few. You can obtain a copy of an individual CRS report by submitting a written request to a congressional office - a cumbersome process - or you can buy one from a commercial service that collects this material. All of these reports could be placed online easily and affordably. Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader from South Dakota, for instance, has posted several hundred CRS reports on his Web site. The CRS reports are also available at a Congress-only intranet. But this site isn't open to the public, and Congress and the CRS have resisted calls to open it up.
Congress also hasn't established a searchable database of votes. On the Thomas site, it's nearly impossible to find a lawmaker's voting record on a given issue unless you know the roll-call numbers of the relevant votes. Nor does the site list committee and subcommittee votes. (Often the most important votes occur in committee, not on the House or Senate floor.) "You can get a senator's favorite recipe on his Web site, but you can't search how he voted," Ruskin says. "None of this is rocket science. A perfectly competent 12-year-old could write this database."
Congress also fails to post the financial disclosure statements of its members. These annual forms, which contain details about personal financial holdings, are available for inspection at the public information offices of the House and Senate. The Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.com), a public interest group based in Washington, scans and posts the records, but these usually don't appear until weeks after they are filed. (See "By the People, For the People," page 232.)
Several times a year, lobbyists are required to register with Congress and reveal what legislation they're attempting to influence. Congress doesn't post these reports either, which is too bad: They show how highpowered interests are working to shape laws. CRP inputs this information and posts it, but again months go by before it becomes available. Other basic documents, such as gift disclosures and expense reports, can be read on paper if you visit or contact the appropriate congressional office, but you won't find them online.
"Why shouldn't Congress post the material as it comes in?" asks Larry Makinson, executive director of the CRP. "There's an institutional inertia that is breathtaking to behold."
Public interest groups are pressuring politicians to release information electronically in a timely manner. Two years ago, the DC-based groups Center for Democracy and Technology and OMB Watch issued a 10 Most Wanted list of government documents that should be on the Web but aren't. The list targeted several congressional items - CRS reports, hearing transcripts, and a searchable database of votes.
Librarians and researchers are also pressing for more e-access. "Hearing transcripts, which include prepared testimony and various attachments, are one of the most heavily used federal documents," says Lynne Bradley, director of the office of government relations at the American Library Association in DC. "It's outrageous they're not all electronically available."
Few in Congress share the outrage. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, have introduced bipartisan legislation that would place CRS reports online and compel the Senate to post lobbyist records and senators' travel and expense records. A broad coalition supported the bill when it was put in the hopper in February 1999, including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Association of Manufacturers, IBM, America Online, Netscape, and Intel. But the legislation has stalled in the Senate Rules Committee. "It just sits there," says McCain.
In the House, Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, and David Price, a Democrat from North Carolina, have introduced legislation to post CRS reports. This measure too is going nowhere fast.
Congress is not the only government body slow to adapt to the Net. The 10 Most Wanted list also included the State Department's daily briefing book, the EPA's pesticide safety database, legal briefs from the Justice Department, and the opinions of federal district and appeals courts. (Most appeals courts make opinions available electronically, though not always on their own Web sites. Most federal district courts do not. Federal law requires courts to make opinions publicly available, but it does not dictate the means by which they do so. In other words, paper is fine.) Three of the items from the 1998 list have become electronically available in the past two years: Supreme Court decisions; PTO Today, the official gazette of the US Patent and Trademark Office; and the Department of Interior's endangered-species recovery plans. The stuffy, tradition-bound Supreme Court unveiled a Web site in April. (The Supreme Court of Mongolia had a site up before the US Supreme Court.) In another case of judicial inertia, the Committee on Financial Disclosures - which manages the federal courts - last year tried to block the Web site APBnews.com from posting the financial disclosure reports filed by all 1,600 federal judges, claiming this would violate the privacy of judges and create security risks for the bench-tenders. These are public documents, so it should have been a no-brainer, but APBnews endured several months of legal wrangling before it won the fight.
Not all the news is bad: A few of the 20,000-plus government Web sites have made real progress in capturing the potential of IT, and the Clinton administration came on strong in its waning months. Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst for CDT, applauds the EPA for posting its Toxics Release Inventory database (www.epa.gov/tri), which visitors can use to determine whether toxic chemicals are being used, transported, or released in their area. He also commends the State Department for quickly putting up the transcripts and audio feeds of its daily briefings (secretary.state.gov/www/briefings), which are carefully read around the world by journalists, government officials, and others who monitor every hiccup in US foreign policy. The House Science Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee occasionally webcast their hearings, and other congressional committees seem ready to follow suit. The Federal Elections Commission maintains an easy-to-use site (www.fec.gov) that supplies extensive information on where politicians get their campaign funds.
On the 2000 campaign trail, Al Gore talked about doing a lot more, calling for the creation of a new "e-government" that would place nearly every federal government service online by 2003. Gore noted that citizens should be able to check their Social Security benefits, look up the status of a student loan, and investigate the purity of their local drinking water on the Net. Gore's running mate, Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Fred Thompson, a Republican from Tennessee, have pushed a similar e-government initiative in the Senate.
Earlier this year, the Clinton White House spent $600,000 over seven months to redesign its Web site (www.whitehouse.gov). The site allows citizens to obtain much of the material (speeches, press briefings, reports, fact sheets) that the White House churns out. It also lets you reserve a campsite in a national forest, file a consumer fraud complaint, review crash results for new automobiles, and apply for financial aid for college. When the redesign was made public, President Clinton announced that a team led by Eric Brewer - cofounder and chief scientist at Inktomi - was busy creating a one-stop site (www. firstgov.gov) for searching all of the federal government documents available online. The impressive goal, which is supposed to be reached sometime this fall, is a site that could handle at least 100 million daily searches, looking through half a billion documents in less than one-quarter of a second.
None of these changes will necessarily compel congressional slowpokes to get with the program. Not to mention the fact that if Congress doesn't digitize its own information, its documents will remain beyond the reach of any one-stop government site. FirstGov, the elections commission's site, and the proposals for e-government vividly demonstrate that Congress lags far behind the other branches of government. These efforts underscore that the obstacles to an e-Congress are not technical ones. They are not cost-driven. It's a matter of will, which is precisely what Congress seems to lack.
After Gingrich sounded off in 1994, he assigned the task of Netifying Congress to Republican representatives Bill Thomas, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee fromCalifornia, and Vernon Ehlers, a physicist who helped get the Michigan legislature online when he served there in the '80s and early '90s. Ehlers moved quickly. By the time Gingrich assumed the speakership in early 1995, Ehlers saw to it that all new bills, committee reports related to these bills, scheduling information, and the US Code (the massive compendium of federal laws) were obtainable free online. Ehlers also oversaw a two-year project to centralize and modernize the House computer system. At the same time, the Library of Congress continued to develop Thomas as a consumer-oriented gateway to the House and Senate computer systems. "Never before in history has the public had such opportunity to be knowledgeable about public officials," Ehlers boasts now.
Gingrich, too, is proud of his effort to computerize Congress, though he concedes it did not proceed as far as it could have. "We moved a fair distance," he says, "but then got bogged down in the act of governing." So how much longer before everything printed is also available online? Don't hold your breath, he counsels. Gingrich believes Congress needs a high-powered task force to fully prod the body into the information age, and that will take some young members making a fuss. Yet the former Speaker still revs up quickly, envisioning a "congressional information service" that brings all the "real-time activities and archived activities" into people's homes via the Internet. "It could be the most profound change since Jefferson sold his library to Congress," he says. "Yet nobody is building that sort of architecture. And no one is introducing legislation to make it happen."
Ehlers gets defensive when challenged on this front. "We've put millions of pages up," he says. "Those complaining are not giving an accurate view of what is available proportionately." How about working drafts of legislation? "Well, that's a tough problem," he says. "I don't know if it's of any comfort to the public, but frequently we don't have written copies of bills. Most bills go through constant change and are kept in a staffer's desk until the final session." (To this, the Congressional Accountability Project's Ruskin counters that lobbyists on the Hill often are able to find printed versions of bills as the legislation proceeds.) As for committee hearings, Ehlers says that it's the committee chairs who determine what happens to the transcripts. "Chairmen can decide whether or not to devote staff" to digitizing and posting transcripts, he says. They rarely do.
Lobbyist disclosure reports? "I know of no policy that would prevent their posting," Ehlers says. True, but there's no policy that leads to their posting, either. CRS reports? Some are, Ehlers asserts, the property of the senators and representatives who order them. It's up to these lawmakers to decide whether they should be released. So automatic posting of those is out of the question. (Ehlers, though, has proposed a compromise that would result in a limited number of CRS reports being made electronically available.)
And what about a searchable database of voting records? "Sure, there could be such a thing. But it's a question of resources. As one of our members put it to me, the problem is that the media is lazy and wants us to do their work for them. To what extent do we have a responsibility to collate information and do databases, when we provide the raw data? It would be a lot of work to organize. So many votes are hard to explain."
The two committees responsible for managing Congress - the House Committee on Administration and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee - share this attitude. Asked whether Congress is lagging, Jason Poblete, the press secretary of the House committee, blasts the detractors: "There are constant critics of the House, and they can find stuff to criticize, but they take no note that half the stuff online was not online four years ago." Confronted with specifics about the still-sizable gaps, Poblete concedes that not all committees have moved to post hearing transcripts and working drafts of legislation. "We will look into that at some point," he says.
Tamara Somerville, staff director of the Senate Rules committee, also quickly shifts the blame to committee chairs: "The committees all operate separately. I don't know what they're doing." In other words, the rules committee is not concerned with the lack of action. In a plea for sympathy, Somerville notes that Congress has trouble competing with the private sector when it comes to finding and retaining computer specialists. "It took us one year to hire an information technology person for our own committee Web page," she says with a sigh. Regarding the posting of lobbyist reports, Somerville says, "I can't recall that ever being discussed. We deal with so much every day. We're just so busy." Clearly, making Congress as compatible as possible with the Internet is not at the top of anyone's to-do list. It's barely a topic of conversation.
The Gingrich promise has been broken. What could be behind the general reluctance of Congress to place all of its public material within keyboard reach of citizens across the country? Could it be that members of Congress want to control information about themselves and don't want to be scrutinized?
"Exactly!" Senator McCain confirms. "All the information we have about what we do should be on the Web. I don't understand the opposition entirely myself. Part of it is an institutional bias. Part is business-as-usual thinking. I have a few allies, but most senators don't pay a lot of attention to this."
Ultimately, the reason for Congress' slow walk is not difficult to fathom: The people running the place are not visionaries looking to change the power dynamic between politicians and citizens. As Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics says, "Newt wanted to put everything up on the Web, except what would inconvenience members of Congress."
Congress should use the Internet, Ruskin argues, to "allow citizens to impact bills while they are in process." Yet Congress is not eager to arm the people with digital information. "It's low on people's radar screens," says a congressional aide sympathetic to the critics. "Talking about government documents and the Internet doesn't grab headlines like saving Social Security or going to war against Serbia. Few people here care a lot about this."
Arguably, it is Congress' responsibility to exploit technological advances that boost citizen involvement in lawmaking and strengthen the bond between those who govern and those who are governed. But this congressional aide states a sad fact: "Unless there is a lot of public interest, there will not be any momentum to move things along."
True, there may not be a widespread popular clamor for an e-Congress. But there was no mass movement for television access to Congress before C-Span began broadcasting congressional proceedings in 1979. Now, C-Span is considered an essential component of the media-age democracy.
A commercial interest may be the driving force of an Net-accessible Congress. And HearingRoom.com's Philip Angell plans to expand his service to cover executive branch hearings, such as those conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Nonetheless, these agencies should post free digital versions of the hearings themselves, he says. Angell proudly notes that his dotcom, for a price, can "provide contemporaneous access to people all across the country - in thousands of cities, state and local governments, colleges, law schools, and libraries - to all who have an interest in Washington."
Angell figured out how the Internet could bridge the gap between Congress and the rest of us. It's shameful that none of the leaders of Congress are thinking about how to put him out of business.
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