(by Paul Blumenthal and John Wonderlich)
Where can I find information on the contracts awarded to Northrop Grumman Corporation? Once I’ve found that information, where can I find the campaign finance and lobbying information for Northrop Grumman Corporation? Have members of Congress have accepted private travel from Northrop Grumman Corporation or a related association? Is [...]

As David All and I have written, the rules governing member Web sites are not fit for the 21st Century Web. If the rules were enforced with any regularity, instead of used as a scarecrow to keep members from innovating, then some of the best practices by members on the Web wouldn’t be happening. Case [...]

Before the Senate version of the legislative branch appropriation gets officially publicly released on THOMAS this afternoon, (as discussed in PDF on the Senate Approps Cmte website, we should probably start to talk about the House version of the legislative branch subcommittee of appropriations, since they’re responsible for providing funding for the things we’re discussing. [...]

In the spirit of engaging in legislative substance, Paul and I decided that a great way to showcase CRS content would be to highlight a small selection of pertinent CRS reports once a week. Below our selections for this week, coming from OpenCRS.com and the Federation of American Scientists, whose secrecy news blog makes [...]

Up to this point, the recommendation in our report that is met with the most criticism and resistance is the chapter on CRS reports.
The critics have very real concerns. They fear that granting broad, no-fee, public access to CRS reports will affect CRS’s ability to do its job. They fear that CRS will [...]

I’m not sure if this is to lighten the mood, but I thought this was amusingly relevant. Michael Pollan, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, describes the chicken processing operation on a small farm. There, the killing and defeathering takes place in the outdoors.
“This was when I began to appreciate what a morally powerful idea [...]

Rep. Baird reintroduced H.R. 504, which would require that bills and conference reports be posted online 72 hours before their consideration. It’s great to see this brought back for another try. I hope this time it gets passed.
Also, I’ve created a new page on this site, a page listing all of the pending legislation relevant [...]

While working on The Open House Project with John and all of you who are a part of the Google Group I was reading the book “On Capitol Hill� by Julian Zelizer. Within the first few pages I was struck by a quote that succinctly described what we were doing. “The process in any given [...]

In the section of the Open House Project report that David All and I co-authored we focused our attention on the Franking regime that restricts the ability of members of Congress from using their Web sites as platforms to communicate with their constituents by using the tools available to enable that communication. What we neglected [...]

Members of Congress are supposed to be restricted by rules governing their Web use and Web sites. In spite of these rules, some members choose to break them to make their official Web sites more interesting and more user-directed. One widely acknowledged example (how often do member Web sites get highlighted on CNN) is the [...]