Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swartz-Trober, your host. On today's show,

government transparency should the Congressional Research Service be allowed to publish all of its

reports online for the public to see.

Joining me to discuss this is Kevin Kosar, senior fellow at the R Street Institute.

Kevin, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me here.

So before joining the R Street Institute, you spent 11 years working at the Congressional Research Service.

So just to start us off, what is CRS and why should listeners care?

CRS is the agency that everyone should be thankful for, but nobody knows about. It's a unit inside the Library of Congress, and it's often referred to as Congress's brains or Congress's

private think tank. It's about 600 civil servants, people who are appointed on the basis of

their expertise, not on the basis of political affiliation. You have PhDs, you have master's

degrees holders, you have experts of all stripe who help Congress think about every issue

under the sun, and Congress is into every issue under the sun.

So theoretically, Congress is contemplating some type of legislation.

They want to know something about the economy or they want to do some research.

Do they go to CRS with a question?

Like, what impact would this bill have?

Or, you know, what would this change to the tax

code mean? Is that the type of work that CRS does? That's part of it, certainly. Realize,

anybody who gets elected to office is probably going to have very little idea about how the

federal government actually works. They come from a locality, they come from a state.

And the federal government is $4 trillion enterprise. It's massive and incredibly complex.

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