S. 1: Commission to Strengthen Confidence in Congress Act of 2007 passed the House today by a ridiculously wide margin, and so I’ll do a bit of biting my hat for all of the “Congress isn’t doing anything”-type complaining I’ve done recently. The bill previously passed in the Senate, also by a wide margin.
Either the […]

Current American political rhetoric often distinguishes between decisions made for politics and decisions made for the sake of good policy, or for government. This distinction is often made in order to accuse an adversary of acting in bad faith, and to deride the unwelcome politics in government. Blaming politics and the complex system […]

I didn’t realize until recently the degree to which transparency reforms can benefit congressional staff.
Today’s Roll Call provides yet another example of how:
House e-mail server problems have left thousands of Capitol Hill staffers wringing their hands in frustration over the past two weeks as Congress has moved into its annual pre-August legislative crunch time.
Of about […]

Presidential Directives: Background and Overview

The recent release of two controversial Executive Orders by President Bush makes this CRS report a must-read to understand the history of Presidential directives, such as the Executive Order, and the ability for the other two branches to challenge them. After you’re done reading this report go to the White House’s […]

When David All and I wrote in an Op-Ed for The Hill that “the time has come to re-imagine the world of the wired elected official,” I did not expect members of Congress to be so quick to pick up and use these new lines of communication. Halfway into the year more members of Congress […]

While much of our report was written by people that, at least currently, are in the game of spreading information in an issue-neutral way — that is, information for the sake of information — it’s always nice to hear that those that are in the game of policy come to (at least some of) the […]

Overview of the Authorization - Appropriations Process  (2 pages)
and
The Congressional Appropriations Process: An Introduction  (32 pages)
Congress is nearly finished with the Appropriations bills for fiscal year 2008 but the President is gearing up to veto some of the bills that he determines are too costly. The appropriations process is hardly transparent and little understood. Take […]

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to get in touch with three people at the Library of Congress, including the LOC’s director of web services (if I’m getting the title right), who took some time to talk to me about the information flow in the LOC that gets legislative information into the website […]

Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues
June 21, 2007
After Republican defections from the Administration’s Iraq position over the past week, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi intend to bring back a plan to force the President to end the war. We all know about the troops in Iraq, but what about private […]

The committee section of the Open House Project report made several specific suggestions about how to make information from congressional committees more publicly accessible and useful. One of the basic steps we recommended was to use RSS feeds to announce committee meetings. We have created a template for announcing committee hearings with structured […]