Senator Gillibrand is cosponsoring the Public Online Information Act, legislation to make public records permanently available on the Internet at no taxpayer cost.
Support the Public Online Information Act to make public records permanently available online and create searchable government catalogs of released records.
Occurrences
Evidence
Senator Gillibrand said she will co-sponsor the Public Online Information Act, requiring any public government document to be made available and searchable online and in user-friendly formats, before it can be deemed public.
Public Online Information Act of 2011 - Establishes a Public Online Information Advisory Committee ... Directs the government to make public records available on the Internet at no charge ... Requires: (1) public records to be permanently available on the Internet; ... and (3) each agency to publish on the Internet a comprehensive, searchable, machine processable list of all records it makes publicly available. Latest Action: Senate - 04/04/2011 Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
The committee print for the 112th Congress lists 'Mr. TESTER Mrs. GILLIBRAND, June 6, 2011' for 'To establish an advisory committee to issue nonbinding governmentwide guidelines on making public information available on the Internet, to require publicly available Government information held by the executive branch to be made available on the Internet, to express the sense of Congress that publicly available information held by the legislative and judicial branches should be available on the Internet, and for other purposes. Cited as the "Public Online Information Act of 2011."
Assessments
Gillibrand materially supported the specific Public Online Information Act by announcing co-sponsorship and appearing on official congressional materials for the 2011 bill. The bill matched the promised policy goals, including permanent online availability of public records and searchable agency catalogs. However, Congress.gov shows S.717 was only introduced/read and referred to committee in the 112th Congress and was not enacted, so the promised public-records regime was not delivered. This qualifies as a serious legislative attempt that failed to produce the promised outcome.