Harold Relyea, a well-respected Congressional research Service analyst who retired in January after more than 30 years of government service, says a recent proposal by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman to make Congressional Research Service reports more easily accessible to the public could pose constitutional challenges. A more workable approach could stem from the Rules Committee's authorization last Congress for CRS to create software to let senators place individual reports on their Web sites, Relyea said. The next step could be building an overarching IT framework that would allow the public to search for CRS reports across senators' sites, he said. Other than a "passing generic reference" in its enacting legislation, CRS is not statutorily obligated to publicly distribute reports, Relyea pointed out. By contrast, the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office do have that requirement. In the past, CRS experimented with publishing summaries of its work but appropriators ended that practice.
