Keeping America Informed: An Introduction to Government Documents

by Infra Read

The motto of the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) is "America Informed," and for us to be informed, it helps to know what our elected officials and other people with power are saying and doing.  Much of this is made purposely obscure, but a massive amount of government documents is out there, and they can be a way to find out in more detail what our government is up to.

The GPO makes reports and publications of all kinds available to the public, including transcripts of hearings from the House, Senate, and government committees on every subject.  The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) sends free copies of physically published documents to participating libraries, who are legally required to give the general public access to the documents.

That means that a local university may restrict most of their services to their tuition-paying students, but if they are part of the FDLP, they need to provide general access to their government documents.  This should include physical ones on their shelves, and electronic documents that are accessed through their online card catalogs.  If they don't allow physical check-out, they have to let people access them on-site, and if computer access is generally restricted, they have to provide some way, like temporary passwords, for anyone off the street to access the documents from a terminal in the building.  A map of libraries in the FDLP is at: ask.gpo.gov/s/FDLD.  The libraries listed as "Regional" receive and keep basically all documents that are published through the program; the "Selective" ones only receive selected documents, and they are allowed to remove older ones from their collections.

Fortunately, the majority of new government documents are available in electronic form, and anyone with Internet access can view them for free.  The main Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) is found at: catalog.gpo.gov.  This is a pretty straightforward search engine, although keywords with too many hits can sometimes cause an error.

To find the most recent documents, you can search using the "Electronic Titles" link under the "Catalogs to Search" banner at the CGP home page.  This brings up a search field for electronic documents only, and a link for "New Electronic Titles," monthly lists of the recently released titles.  This will include older records that have been digitized and added to the listings.  The backlog of documents, from before digitization was the norm, is continually being worked on.  For example, the July 2022 list contains a series of technical reports from the 1940s National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a report on welding techniques from 1963, and space shuttle structural analyses from 1989.

Between transcribing, digitizing, and releasing the documents in a finished form, there can be time lags, so sometimes even a document with a publication date of 2022 can be for a meeting from 2017.  A lot of it is fairly current, though, and hearings on big, newsworthy subjects, such as the impeachment hearings for Donald Trump or the January 6th riots, will usually get printed and distributed fairly quickly.

All these searches should bring up electronic resources with "purls" (permanent URLs), and unlike many library systems, the search logic is fuzzy enough to bring up related subjects.  For example, a search for the term "cyberpunk" doesn't have any hits, but it does bring up similar terms; for example, "cyberprotests" (which were considered a "threat to the U.S. information infrastructure" in a 2001 report from the National Infrastructure Protection Center (purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/LPS15585).

In the results list for "cybersecurity," there's also more recent information, like the hearing on the "Cybersecurity State Coordinator Act of 2020 report... to establish a Cybersecurity State Coordinator in each state, and for other purposes," from June 2020.

Some of these documents are very dense and legalistic, clearly not designed to be read by the general public, but others, like the Congressional hearings, are often more readable, even interesting, since they include direct transcripts of everything spoken, and even note when there's laughter during a hearing.

A related resource of interest is the Congressional Research Service at crsreports.congress.gov.  They have some interesting things like the "Overview of Governmental Action Under the Stored Communications Act (SCA)," which "governs access to stored wire and electronic communications such as emails and other online messages held by service provider," currently being looked at for its relationship to private messages via social media.

One particularly interesting government entity was the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a cybersecurity task force whose documents are available at www.solarium.gov.  This was a working group that produced white papers, a cybersecurity briefing for President Biden, and a 182-page final report of proposals from 2020, including "Reshape the Cyber Ecosystem" and "Preserve and Employ the Military Instrument of National Power."

Much of the specific work on cybersecurity is done under the umbrella of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (www.cisa.gov), an agency under DHS oversight that contains multiple specialized divisions, including the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.  Many of their hearings and documents are available through a CGP search.  The Department of Defense maintains a separate U.S. Cyber Command, but much of their documentation is available only through Freedom of Information Act requests, not through the GPO.

All the material produced by the GPO technically belongs to the American people at large and is legally required to be made available to them.  This is a little-known resource, but while some of it takes work to weed through, it's full of information.
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