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Daily Archives: March 13, 2025

CRS Reports Moved to Congress.gov – not full archive of all reports

Daniel Schuman Executive Director | American Governance Institute: “There was a good presentation on this change at yesterday’s Congressional Data Task Force meeting, which includes congressional and public stakeholders. Prior to the meeting, I wrote a summary of the changes. That article is here – One thing to note is that the roll out of CRS reports as HTML, publication via API endpoint, integration into Congress.gov, and so on is not yet complete and will likely take through June to cover the corpus of reports the Library had been making publicly available pursuant to congressional direction. Further note that the Library of Congress is not publishing all CRS reports, but rather all CRS reports required to be made publicly available by the Equal Access to CRS Reports Act enacted circa 2018. There are thousands of reports (many of which are digitized) in CRS’s archives going back to 1970 that are not available online to the public or available on CRS’s internal website. My website, everycrsreport.com, has some of those reports, but thousands more are either available only through paid services or not available at all unless you have access to CRS’s internal archive. Despite legal authority to publish the pre-2018 reports, CRS has disclaimed that authority and says it will require Congress to direct it to do so. We should express our appreciation to appropriators for directing and the Library of Congress for implementing these improvements for public access to CRS reports, which have been requested by the public since 1997. The integration of CRS reports into the Congress.gov website is a significant improvement as is the availability by API. I asked at the Congressional Data Task Force convening for the Library of Congress to meet with public stakeholders regarding what the website should look like and address bugs, usability issues, feature requests, and the like. The Library representative said they would take back that request to leadership. Historically that’s how they say *no*, but perhaps the Library and new CRS Director will consider this an opportunity to directly engage with users. They’re built a clever product and this is a good opportunity for a reset.”

Donald Trump, Revenge Junkie

Mother Jones, David Corn: “Now that he’s back in the White House—after his humiliating 2020 defeat—Trump has embarked on a revenge-a-thon that goes beyond what we might have expected even from a vengeance junkie. He has removed security protection from past aides who pissed him off—including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security… Continue Reading

Global Atlas of Environmental Justice

What type of information can you find in the EJAtlas? The EJatlas maps conflicts across 10 main categories: Nuclear Mineral Ores and Building Extractions Waste Management Biomass and Land Conflicts Fossil Fuels, Energy and Climate Justice Water Management Infrastructure and Built Environment Tourism Recreation Biodiversity Conservation Conflicts Industrial and Utilities Conflicts The database contains information… Continue Reading

Prepping isn’t just for preppers anymore – it’s time to get a go-bag

PopSci: “For most folks, the word “prepper” evokes an image of someone who’s got way too much time on their hands at best, and who spends way too much time following conspiracies on the Internet at worst. But while you might not want to fill a backyard bunker with canned food (or, frankly, need to),… Continue Reading

Vals Legal AI Report

Vals Legal AI Report [registration required] “This first-of-its-kind study evaluates how four legal AI tools perform across seven legal tasks, benchmarking their results against those produced by a lawyer control group (the Lawyer Baseline). The seven tasks evaluated in this study were Data Extraction, Document Q&A, Document Summarization, Redlining, Transcript Analysis, Chronology Generation, and EDGAR… Continue Reading

Federal Worker Layoffs Climb Toward 250,000 as Deadline Looms

Bloomberg Law: “The Trump administration’s push to drastically shrink the federal government shifts to a new gear Thursday, when agencies face a deadline to submit plans for large-scale layoffs and budget cuts. With them, the list of government job cuts that for weeks had been measured in the tens of thousands — and included retirements,… Continue Reading

Musk Watch DOGE Tracker

Judd Legum: “Yesterday, we launched the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker. This new tool authoritatively demonstrated that Elon Musk had been grossly overstating the cuts implemented by DOGE. While Musk claimed that DOGE had made $105 billion in cuts, the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker revealed that just $8.6 billion of those cuts were verifiable. Within hours,… Continue Reading