Submitted by Dan

NORMALLY, I'd ask that you submit your own entry based on the article or topic you'd like to discuss. However, I'll make an exception today :)

The Congressional Research Service is well known in policy circles -- especially defense policy circles -- for writing some of the smartest, sanest analyses you could ever hope to get in Washington.  Their reports are non-partisan.  They present dissenting points of view.  And they are unclassified -- meaning, everyone is allowed to read them.

Or so you'd think.

But, in practice, taxpayers are prevented from seeing the work of these taxpayer-funded researchers.  CRS' database of reports has been kept from public view -- although "members of the press, other researchers, and other government officials to request specific" documents, Secrecy News notes.  While CRS fights the Internet age, a few organizations, like the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Federation of American Scientists and the State Department, have built up online catalogs of the Service's reports.

Now, however, "in what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of 'managerial dementia,' the Director of the Congressional Research Service [Daniel Mulhollan] this week prohibited all public distribution of CRS products without prior approval from senior agency officials," Secrecy News says.

The new policy demonstrates that "this is an organization in freefall," according to one CRS analyst. "We are now indeed working for Captain Queeg."

"We're all sort of shaking," another CRS staffer told Secrecy News. "I can't do my work."

"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," the staffer said. "Now I can't do that?"

Mulhollan's choice is going to make executive branch policy decisions dumber and slower (since they rely on the CRS reports, too).  It's going to make Congressional decisions dumber and slower (since information-swapping will become that much more difficult).   It's going to make our government function less efficiently.  And it's going to put the public further in the dark.

Nice going, Mulhollan. 

Posted by Noah Shachtman 12:06:28 PM in  Secret Squirrel