You'd be hard-pressed to tell sometimes, but the United States Congress actually maintains its own in-house think tank, staffed by a seasoned team of lawyers, economists, and policy experts: the Congressional Research Service. Founded in 1914 as the Legislative Reference Service, CRS now commands an annual budget in excess of $100 million. But while its funding is public, the reports CRS produces—covering 150 distinct issue areas, according to its 2007 annual report—aren't. While members of Congress frequently choose to make reports they've commissioned public, CRS itself has resisted multiple efforts to amend the law to make its research public as a matter of course.
As that 2007 report puts it, CRS's "policy of confidentiality" is meant to reassure legislators that "that they can come to CRS to explore issues, and they can do so without question, challenge, or disclosure." The idea is to let members inquire into controversial topics without exposing themselves to controversy—but the result is also that legislators get to pick and choose which findings they want to share with the rest of the world.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has been doing its best to pierce that veil of confidentiality with OpenCRS, a repository of all the reports that have been released or leaked. This weekend, they got a treasure trove of fresh documents thanks to Wikileaks, which has passed along 6,780 CRS reports—the vast majority of which weren't previously available. Almost 2,300 of them were produced or updated in the past year, and many address such timely issues as the DTV transition, the powers of the Director of National Intelligence, economic stimulus, the Fairness Doctrine, consumer privacy legislation, and the future of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Congress, of course, could choose to make all this redundant by simply instructing CRS to publicly post its own reports. In the meantime, you can BitTorrent the whole cache from, believe it or not, The Pirate Bay.
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