Every week, the public is treated to another example of how our government is keeping important information from the American people. The latest developments at the Congressional Research Service are enough to make open government advocates bang their heads in exasperation. After spending years urging Congress to make the reports more readily available to ordinary taxpayers, the open government community was rewarded in recent months by the CRS taking two steps to make its publicly funded resources LESS accessible to the public. Vexing to be sure, but sadly predictable to anyone who has taken in interest in the CRS debate.

American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the CRS, which generates expert reports relevant to current public policy debates for lawmakers. But while the reports are non-classified, and play a critical role in shaping public policy, they have never been made available in a consistent way to members of the public. Although lawmakers are free to give copies of the reports to their constituents upon request, this is a slow, unreliable process, made slower and less reliable by the fact that there's no real way for an individual taxpayer to know what reports have been published.

If open government advocates thought that the political changes in Congress would lead to CRS reports finally being made available to the public, they've been sadly mistaken, at least thus far. CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan recently issued an internal memo aimed at preventing CRS employees from releasing reports to the sources with which they work.  That memo came on the heels of an earlier decision by CRS to make it harder for its analysts to speak publicly about their research.  These decisions reflect many lawmakers' deeply entrenched resistance to making these reports readily available.

What is most troubling about that resistance is how little sense it makes in the Internet age. Once, lawmakers could have legitimately argued that it would be too costly to make copies of the detailed reports available to all. In the Internet age, however, that argument is almost laughable. CRS already maintains a fully searchable, password-protected Web site for members of Congress. Increasing capacity and providing public access to that site would constitute a trivial expense for the Library of Congress or for the House in light of their current levels of traffic.

The other argument that often gets tossed out by defenders of the status quo is that making CRS reports available to the public may cause members curtail their use of the service, rather than tip their hands about the issues that they are considering. This argument is also troubling, for a couple of reasons. First, it is anathema to an open society for lawmakers to be arguing for their ability to conduct more policymaking activities away from the the public eye, and second, any notion that the CRS process is somehow "secret" has been long since invalidated by the rise of a large and thriving market for the reports.

Companies like Lexis-Nexis, Penny Hill Press and others charge well-heeled clients a premium to obtain access to the reports, which they obtain through their own private channels. This means that for lobbyists, executives and others who can afford to pay, CRS reports are readily available. It is unconscionable that taxpayers should be forced to pay twice for these reports, but that is the landscape that has been created by this outdated, misguided policy.  The CRS's recent internal crackdown against releasing reports will likely only serve to raise the price of the private services, making the inequity even greater

Public demand for these reports has never been higher. In a little more than a year, members of the public have downloaded more than 3.5 million CRS reports from the Center for Democracy & Technology's Open CRS project, an online service that provides a searchable database of CRS reports that have been obtained by various archivists and members of the public. Making the full catalog of these reports readily available over the Internet will sate those demands and help produce a better-informed electorate.