Although access to the CRS database is restricted to Congress, journalists, researchers, and government officials have been able to request specific reports from the agency. Mulhollan’s memo continues to permit such requests, but “prior approval should now be requested at the division or office level.” However, it adds, “Product requests can also originate from other non-congressional sources including individual researchers, corporations, law offices, private associations, libraries, law firms, and publishers. The Inquiry Section typically declines these requests, and most often refers the caller to his or her congressional representative’s office.” Requests will now be honored only when “it can be demonstrated that the distribution benefits the Congress by assisting CRS in its work” through reciprocity for information-sharing, peer review, or expert opinion.
Mulhollan’s memo was reported by the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News website. A CRS analyst told Secrecy News that the new policy demonstrates that “this is an organization in freefall,” adding, “We are now indeed working for Captain Queeg.” Another staffer said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t talk to someone in another agency, another organization, or someone else outside of Congress and we share information. Now I can’t do that?”
For years, members of Congress and open-government groups have called for CRS’s taxpayer-funded research to be made more widely available. In 2003 Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) reintroduced legislation to make CRS documents available to the public online, and in 1998 the American Library Association passed a resolution urging CRS to distribute its reports through the Federal Depository Library Program and on the internet.
Posted on March 23, 2007.