Committee Information as a Public Resource

Recommendation Summary

“As agenda setters, sources of expertise and policy developers, committees are the lifeblood of the congressional system,â€? reads the 1993 Final Report of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress—and we agree. ³³ With new Internet technology and increased public interest, congressional committees can serve a greater role as “sources of expertiseâ€? by posting their proceedings and publications online as a public resource. Two specific reforms will help Congress respond to the public’s growing capacity for legislative information: committee proceedings should be made public through audio, video and text; and guidelines should be set to standardize the now highly varied offerings of committee Web sites.

The House should follow the Senate’s lead and adopt a rules change requiring all House committees to promptly post online substantially verbatim records of their proceedings.

Guidelines should be set standardizing the offerings on committees’ Web sites, recognizing their essential legislative and oversight roles and realizing their potential as a public resource given their central functional role. Specifically, committees should:

•explain their functions

•link to relevant resources on THOMAS

•publicly post all relevant documents and information, including:

•recorded votes (as per H. RES. 231) using XML

•testimony and transcripts

•hearing and meeting schedules, on individual committee sites and on a centralized site, using RSS feeds for schedules and for notification of other offerings

Publicizing Committee Proceedings

Congressional committees are the primary locus of legislative activity. By permitting representatives to focus their skills and knowledge on specific topics, the standing committees institutionalize legislators’ expertise. Most reform efforts aimed at congressional committees have focused on their main responsibilities: drafting laws and providing oversight. Congressional reorganization efforts have targeted the jurisdiction of committees, the selection of chairs, voting methods, staff and funding. The role of the public spectator, however, has commanded comparatively little attention.

House Rules on Access to Committees

House rules today provide a solid foundation for using the Internet to promote transparency. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 improved the public’s ability to access committee documents, “requir[ing] the transcription of all public and closed session hearings by all House and Senate committeesâ€? (Congressional Information Service, Inc.). It didn’t, however, require the publication or preservation of hearing transcripts. ³⁴ The current rules have helped to remedy this situation. For instance, House Rule XI requires that “(e)(1)(A) Each committee shall keep a complete record of all committee action which shall include— (i) in the case of a meeting or hearing transcript, a substantially verbatim account of remarks actually made during the proceedings.â€? Verbatim transcripts are an important resource for citizens who cannot attend meetings in person and for historical preservation.

A further improvement exists in House Rule XI, clause 2, which provides that “(4) Each committee shall make its publications available in electronic form to the maximum extent feasible.� But it makes a qualification which, by being broadly applicable to all committee documents, undermines the notion of public access: “In implementing clause 2(e), committees may prescribe regulations to govern the manner of access to their records, such as requiring examination only in committee rooms.� House rules should be updated to ensure that electronic publication is the norm, not the exception.

Public Access to Committee Proceedings is Considered

Emerging Internet-based forms of civic engagement are prompting a reassessment of how committee information is presented to the public. Now that committee proceedings can be posted online, at almost no cost, they can be made available to the public in a truly useful way. While in the past access was limited to those geographically near committee offices and to those with expensive subscriptions to commercial information services, the Internet can now bring committees’ work to anyone who is online.

Many committees are embracing this new technology, even webcasting videos of their proceedings. ³⁵ This is a step in the right direction—the public has an enormous interest in gaining timely access to all open committee proceedings. The topics covered in committee are as varied as the committees that hold them, and their content is central to the national debate.

Even as some committees are embracing the Internet, investing time in publishing documents and proceedings online, others are not, for a variety of reasons. Rather than leaving public access and the historic record to the variable discretion of the committee chairs, the House should require that all committees publish their proceedings online shortly after they occur.

The Senate took a step to do just that in January 2007 with S. 1 ³⁶ , introducing the following requirement for all its committees: “Except with respect to meetings closed in accordance with this rule, each committee and subcommittee shall make publicly available through the Internet a video recording, audio recording, or transcript of any meeting not later than 14 business days after the meeting occurs.’’ When introducing the amendment that contained this requirement, Sen. Ken Salazar remarked, “I was surprised to realize how difficult it is for constituents to figure out what goes on in our committee meetings—where the bulk of the legislative process takes place…â€? ³⁷

This amendment is set to take effect in October 2007. Allaying fears that the requirement might be burdensome to committees, Salazar continued, “First, they have until October 1, 2007 to adjust their practices. Second, they have 3 options—audio, video, or transcript—to comply. Third, many of the committees already post this information online.�

Recommendations for the Availability of Committee Proceedings

The House should follow the Senate’s lead and adopt a rule requiring all House committees to post records of their proceedings online. The records should be timely, accurate and archived. Live webcasting is a great start, but if video isn’t archived, its impact is severely limited. (Archiving is covered in detail in the Preserving Congressional Information section of this report.) Transcripts should provide an accurate portrayal of proceedings. To guarantee this, the “substantially verbatim� requirement should be maintained.

By requiring committee proceedings to be available online, the House can enhance its role as a hub of policy expertise, broadly promoting public knowledge rather than placing levels of restriction on information privilege.

Committee Web Page Standards

Committee information gets published online through Web pages maintained separately by congressional staff, not only for each of the House’s twenty-four committees and each of their subcommittees, but also under the authority of the chair and ranking member, with separate Web pages for the majority and the minority. Standards for committee Web site content are determined by each individual chair or ranking member, subject to the restrictions set by the Franking Commission. In the absence of a clear mandate for precisely what committees should be publishing on their Web sites, the availability of committee records, including those governed by House rules, varies immensely from one committee to another.

Only about half of open committee hearings and meetings in the 109th Congress were posted online in the form of a transcript or electronic recording, with wide variation among different committees. ^{38 , 39} By providing guidelines for committee Web pages and standards for data delivery, the leadership in the House can create better public access to important committee documents, events and actions. Committee Web site content guidelines should include the following:

An Explanation of the Committee’s Legislative Role

Although committees play a crucial role in the legislative process, their role in shaping and filtering legislation is perhaps, to the public, the most obscure of all of Congress’s activities. Committees should use their Web sites to be pro-active in explaining their legislative actions in non-parliamentary language that is accessible to the public, while at the same time articulating the legislative consequences of their actions. A press release that covers the reporting of an amendment in the nature of a substitute, for instance, should be clear: first, in its explanation of what the terminology means; second, about what substantive aspects of the bill are changed by the amendment; and third, about the reasons for the change and, as far as possible, about who suggested and supported the changes. By making these explanations, committees can help citizens to be more knowledgeable about the committee system.

Committees can also use their Web sites to help citizens follow the work being done on the bills referred to each committee. A link from committee Web pages to the legislation, amendments and reports on the THOMAS Web site is an important first step already being taken by several committees, a noteworthy example being the Committee on the Judiciary. Committees should also indicate which bills referred to them are likely to be considered in the future, as far as is known. For bills that have been considered in meetings, the progress made on each bill should be documented and explained on the committee’s Web site and updated in a timely fashion.

A Record of Votes

Members’ votes in committees play a crucial role in the legislative process, but they receive far less attention than they deserve because the schedule and results of committee votes are particularly inaccessible. While committee votes are documented in the public reports attached to legislation, the legislative language used in reports is too unfamiliar to the public for the reports to be considered an open or transparent means of disseminating committee voting records. Further, the delay between a vote and a report prevents timely access to the information.

The House should update its rules to incorporate technological advances in making committee votes more accessible to the public. On March 9, 2007, Rep. Pete Sessions introduced H. R. 231, ⁴⁰ which would require committee votes to be published online within 48 hours of their occurrence. We strongly urge this resolution to be taken up, and also suggest that the House go a step further. For the House floor, roll call votes are posted online in (near) real-time in both a browsable and downloadable, structured data (XML) format. Committee votes should be made available to the public in the same manner.

Testimony and Transcripts

Access to the testimony of experts or witnesses at committee hearings is a valuable public resource. Testimony gives insight into legislative environment and action, and brings respected and informed individuals to the forefront of public awareness. For example, testimony to the Committee on House Administration for the 2006 Hearing on Information Technology Assessment provided essential information for this report. The unique value of testimony necessitates its timely availability for viewing on committee Web sites.

Prepared testimony and prepared statements should not be used to replace transcripts of actual proceedings. The proceedings themselves are important legal and cultural events, so substantially verbatim transcripts must be made available for the public, and preserved for the future. While the preparation of transcripts is a time-consuming process, owing to the need for typographical and other corrections, the transcribing process should have a degree of oversight to ensure that transcriptions are timely and do not deviate substantially from the events that actually transpired.

Schedules and RSS Feeds

With all of the activities taking place in the dozens of committees and subcommittees of the House of Representatives, it can quickly become impossible for interested citizens to stay up to date on the activities in even a handful of them. The manner and consistency with which committees publicize the schedule of their hearings and meetings determine the ability of the public to attend and watch those hearings. Committee Web sites should strive to make their schedules public as far in advance as possible, and in a format that makes the schedules readily accessible to the public. The Senate, for instance, has a Web page where schedules of hearings from all committees are posted together. ⁴¹ The House should provide a similar resource.

If each committee were to post its schedule in a standardized form, such as RSS (more on that below), creating a centralized listing from the current decentralized management of committee schedules would be straightforward. Moreover, announcements of meetings, hearings, markups, and the availability of new transcripts and documents should be broadcast via RSS. Feeds could then be aggregated in a centralized location, in addition to being available on individual committee pages.

The current use of RSS feeds by committees to make announcements has been a positive step. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds are special files on the Web that summarize a list of news items, blog posts or other items as they are posted. This is a type of structured data format that allows people to process the growing volume of information they wish to read over the Internet. RSS feeds allow computers to automatically fetch and sort the headlines from a user’s chosen news sources, eliminating the need for the user to check each Web site periodically for updates. RSS feeds can be used for a variety of purposes in the House, such as posting schedules of upcoming hearings or committee bill activity such as votes or markup sessions.

The way committees make use of RSS can affect how people navigate the information being published by committees. Effective use of RSS feeds allow them to be transformed by independent Web site programmers into other uses. RSS feed authors can pull from each feed’s descriptive content information such as the date and time of a hearing or a list of related bills, and put it into separate machine-readable “tags.� This makes it possible, for instance, for independent Web sites to mesh a committee markup meeting feed with bill status and summary information, or to transform a hearing schedule feed into a calendar. The technical details of best practices of RSS feeds are beyond the scope of these recommendations, but implementing such RSS feeds would involve developing a small number of data standards that, to be most useful, should be shared across committees.

Additional Elements

Committee Web sites should include all relevant public information pertaining to their history and operations. This information includes the committee’s rules, oversight plans, jurisdiction, membership, subcommittee information and other pertinent documents.

Conclusion

Committee information should be treated as a public resource. The House should amend its rules to require that committee proceedings be published online shortly after all open meetings, as the Senate did in approving the Salazar amendment. Guidelines for standardizing content and presentation should be set for committee Web sites.

Previous Section | Next Section