Posts tagged as ‘Congress’
On Tuesday, June 13th, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin testified before the House Appropriations Committee in defense of the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Budget request (see the request here). Mnuchin’s testimony showed an opening to standardize data fields and formats across the nation’s overlapping financial regulatory regimes - just as the Data Coalition has already been recommending to Congress.
Last week the White House released President Trump’s first proposed budget. We read it, and we figured out what it means for federal technology and the implementation of the DATA Act, so you don’t have to.
Congressman David Brat (R-VA) and Congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA) have reintroduced the Statutes at Large Modernizations Act (SALMA), H.R. 1729. If enacted, SALMA would put all historical federal laws online in a machine-readable, open data format.
The DATA Act is arriving in the nick of time. The years ahead are unlikely to be a period of budgetary growth. The government pretty much has the resources they are going to have. The threats facing the U.S., however, are growing and coming at us at the speed of blur in an unforgiving environment.
FROM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR HUDSON HOLLISTER: "We call on the new Trump Administration and the 115th Congress to enforce (and expand) the DATA Act, embrace a government-wide transformation of all information resources through the OPEN Government Data Act, and initiate regulatory reforms that use open data to reduce burdens, governed by the Financial Transparency Act and other reforms. I am optimistic that we will realize all three goals."
Earlier this month, the open Congress movement gained a huge endorsement from House Speaker Paul Ryan. The Speaker backed the adoption of Congressional data standards and common formats for legislative information. The House Speaker's endorsement of the Bulk Data Task Force's work will further efforts to make legislation, floor summaries, committee work, and the U.S. Code available as structured data. The Speaker even endorsed the technical approach of building out XML-based open data structures across Congress.
Reps. Darrell Issa and Mike Quigley co-chair the bipartisan Congressional Transparency Caucus. The've just announced that next week, on Tuesday, March 22, they will co-host a Transparency Caucus briefing on the implementation of the DATA Act.
Last week a multi-year campaign to let the public see Congressional research reports paid off. On Thursday, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced House and Senate versions of the Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Act of 2016 (Open CRS Act; H.R. 4702 and S. 2639). The Open CRS Act aims to publically release the renowned legislative research products produced by the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (CRS) on a public web portal.
This Tuesday morning the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the full Fiscal Year 2017 budget request. This first fiscal shot across the bow establishes President Obama’s vision for how the Executive branch will be managed at the end of his second term. It expresses his legacy priorities by assigning dollar values. More than any policy statement or hearing testimony could, the budget shows how the Obama Administration views the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act).
The Coalition has long opposed Rep. Robert Hurt's Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act (H.R. 1965), which would severely disrupt the SEC’s ability to collect open data financial statements from most public companies, and regress to only collecting the information as plain-text documents. H.R. 1965 is back on the House of Representatives' agenda. It has been included in a package bill the House is scheduled for a vote this Wednesday.