1.6: Bills
Other Information:
Bills are a "pretty-good-news" story in legislative transparency. Most are promptly published. It would be better, of course,
if they were all immediately published at the moment they were introduced, and if both the House and Senate published last-minute,
omnibus bills before debating and voting on them. A small gap in authority exists around bills. Some people look to the Library
of Congress and the THOMAS site, and now beta.congress.gov, for bill information. Others look to the Government Printing Office.
Which is the authority for bill content? This issue has not caused many problems so far. Once published, bill information
remains available, which is good. Publication of bills in HTML on the THOMAS site makes them reasonably machine- discoverable.
Witness the fact that searching for a bill will often turn up the version at that source. Where bills could improve some is
in their machine-readability. Some information such as sponsorship and U.S. code references is present in the bills that are
published in XML, and nearly all bills are now published in XML, which is great. Much more information should be published
machine-readably in bills, though, such as references to agencies and programs, to states or localities, to authorizations
and appropriations, and so on, referred to using standard identifiers. With the work that the THOMAS system does to gather
information in one place, bill data are good. This is relative to other, less well- published data, though. There is yet room
for improvement.
Stakeholder(s):
Indicator(s):
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