Agencies can begin submitting congressionally mandated reports to online system this month

Federal agencies will begin submitting the thousands of reports they have compiled for congressional committees to the Government Publishing Office’s online portal on Oct. 16 as part of the final steps of a law enacted to make them electronically accessible by the public.

GPO officials said in a statement Wednesday that federal agencies can now sign up for a submission portal account on its GovInfo site and begin submitting electronic copies of their congressionally mandated reports to the site less than two weeks from now. 

“Our GPO teammates made great progress in developing the systems for federal agencies to comply with the new law and to begin the process of making these reports available to the public,” said GPO director Hugh Nathanial Halpern in a statement. “Having a one-stop location on GovInfo will provide the American people an invaluable opportunity to see information which was often not publicly available.”

The portal will post all reports required by federal statute to be submitted to either house of Congress, with exceptions like reports covering law enforcement sensitivities, information security practices within the executive branch and reports submitted by the District of Columbia government. 

Congressional reports the Government Accountability Office, the intelligence community, patriotic and national organizations defined by U.S. statute, inspectors general reports or national security-based reports submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Committee on Armed Services, the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on Appropriations or the House Committee on Foreign Affairs are also exempt.

The move is part of legislation enacted in the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022, that called for GPO to incorporate functionality to electronically publish the reports and expand their reach to the public, providing a year to set up the portal.

The Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to federal agencies back in June on how to prepare for the shift and establish standards that called for open, machine-readable file formats and searchable text.

The guidance said that the law applies to reports compiled enacted on or after Dec. 23, 2022, but that reports submitted before that date may also be included “to the extent practicable.” 

GPO expects reports submitted will be available to the public on GovInfo by Dec. 23, 2023.