Want to know which bills your representatives in Congress have sponsored and cosponsored?

Simply find their pages in this state-by-state listing and scroll down to see the bills they’re involved with.

The new “Representatives” section of WashingtonWatch.com allows you to see more of what’s happening in Washington, D.C.

In addition to looking over representation by state, you can see an alphabetical list, a list of members by seniority, and—here’s an interesting one—a list of who has sponsored and cosponsored the most bills.

The representatives most discussed on WashingtonWatch.com are featured on the “Representatives” home page.

Every representatives page has the same commenting, voting, and wiki editing that bill pages have. Let people know what you think! (Be nice…)

And now on every bill page, you can see who it’s sponsors and co-sponsors were. It’s a nice window onto the world of Washington, D.C. Is the bill you’re interested in one that has support from only one party? Or is it a bipartisan bill?

Want to know which bill has the most cosponsors? Take a look!

We hope that this will make WashingtonWatch.com a more useful resource for you. We plan to add more information in the near future.

Take a look at your representatives’ activity in Washington, D.C., and then please tell a friend!

The new 113th Congress began on January 3rd, the 112th having adjourned for the final time on January 2nd.

That means that all the bills pending in the 112th Congress are dead. A raft of new bills has already been introduced.

You can tell the Congress in which a bill was proposed by looking in the URL of its page. If it has a 112_HR_1234, that’s H.R. 1234 in the 112th Congress. If it has a 113_HR_1234, that means it’s from the 113th Congress.

But what’s really important to know is that we’ll soon be mothballing bills from the 112th Congress. That means voting stops, wiki editing stops, and comments stop.

A lot of conversations are happening on these pages, and we regret that they will have to stop.

They will have to stop happening on these pages, at least.

If you want to stay in communication about the issues, we recommend that you create a petition. Petitions can link to the bills that relate to them, so you can bring people from many bills, old and new, together. Find out everything you need to know about petitions at this link.

If you want to just compare notes with fellow WashingtonWatchtonians, you can do so at The Lounge, a petition page some of our users created just for that purpose.

We’ll be pointing to this post on the pages with the most active discussions, but if you find that your conversation has been cut off and you’re looking around to see what happened, please accept our apologies.

And please look for the new bills that matter to you and the petitions, which, again, can draw people together from many bills.

Happy 113th Congress!

Maybe President Obama made a mistake during the 2008 campaign, promising great strides in government transparency as he did. Because he hasn’t delivered them.

House Republicans, on the other hand, started from a better place than President Obama, made modest claims about how they would improve, and took some steps in the direction of improvement.

This makes it pretty easy to say that the president lags House Republicans in terms of transparency.

We’re really not big on politics around here. The point is not to play red-team/blue-team. So let’s talk about concrete measures of transparency progress. If the government is more transparent, you can get better info here on WashingtonWatch.com. Then you can be a smarter voter and citizen, and you’ll be a happier person.

(Disclosure: For the last few years, your WashingtonWatch.com webmaster has been doing transparency not just as a nights and weekends project on this site, but also in his role as Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. My general policy is not to advertise Cato work or Cato policy positions on WashingtonWatch.com, but this issue is non-ideological, non-partisan, and highly relevant here.)

Today (on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., 2:00 p.m. Eastern), I’ll be presenting at a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Transparency about how well government data is published.

You can get a sneak peak of the grades I’ll be delivering right here.

The idea has been to come up with something measurable. Over the last couple of years, we’ve created models of what legislative processes would look like if they were published as really good data. We’ve done the same with budgeting and spending information. What would it look like if it were really good data?

Next, we’ve been assessing how well that data is currently published. Some of it is the responsibility of Congress. Some is the responsibility of the White House. And some of it is a divided responsibility.

How well is it published? Not well at all.

The worst of it is probably this: There is no machine-readable federal government organization chart.

What that means is that there aren’t distinct identifiers computers could use to help us in organizing our oversight of the government. That makes it really, really hard for us to present you good information about the government. It makes it hard to gather what agencies, bureaus, projects, and programs are affected by the bills in Congress.

You know how easy it is to shop on Amazon or eBay? It should be that easy to keep track of what’s going in Congress. But the data isn’t there. That’s a failure of President Obama’s, who claimed he would deliver transparent government.

So here are the report cards we’ve produced, illustrating how Congress and the White House are doing on publishing data. None of the grades are very good, but where Congress has weak grades, the Obama Administration’s grades are horrible. Thus, our conclusion, Obama lags House Republicans on transparency.

There are things you can do to help.

See the thumbnails of the report cards we created? Click on those to get the full-sized PDF. Print them out and send them to your representative in Congress and your senators.

They don’t know you care about this stuff until you tell them. They will get the idea that they need to do better on transparency, if you just let them know. Mountains won’t move that instant, but it’s an important step in improving government transparency.

Some of our visitors are very frustrated by the behavior of others on the site, trolling behavior that seeks to disrupt conversation. Our comment controls can help.

Here’s some insight into what kind of person does trolling.

Our advice for dealing with trolls is always: Ignore them.

Time’s Techland blogger Jerry Brito links to WashingtonWatch.com in his story about the recent SOPA/PIPA revolution:
“Why We Won’t See Many Protests like the SOPA Blackout.”

The bill that caught his eye? The Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011. It’s a bill he knows nothing about, like most bills for most people!

The persistence of mass-scale ignorance of Washington, D.C. is why he thinks there isn’t a new world of Internet activism upon us.

We’re trying to change that…

In our (free!) weekly email newsletter, we cut to the chase, giving you the quickest overview of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But if you want more than the bare-bones information about what’s happening in Congress, a good resource is The Hill’s Floor Action blog. It goes through the details of what’s happening on the Hill from day to day, with a light dusting of commentary to keep things interesting. (You see, not everything going on in Congress is interesting….)

A sample from their summary of the upcoming week:

How will Congress handle things like tax extenders and pressure to extend unemployment insurance? What’s the plan for passing the next stopgap spending measure, which is needed by December 16? How will Republican pressure to avoid cuts in planned defense spending manifest itself in the coming weeks? If the schedule for next week is any guide, none of these burning questions will be answered on the floor of the House and Senate.

Yes, there are plenty of things happening this week, but not much in the way of happenings happening. Business as usual in the nation’s capitol.

When crunch-time comes around some of these issues will get resolved and some cans will get kicked still further down the road.

Kudos to The Hill for providing detail—and even the bill numbers of legislation coming to the floor. We’ll stay with the bare bones in our weekly email, for the people who want to get something more like just the facts.

You can tell sometimes that WashingtonWatch.com is a nights-and-weekends project. The latest clue is the Subject: line from this morning’s email: “How Will Congress Pay for Tax Relieving Tax Burden?” That’s inartful at best.

In sorting through various short phrasings for a fairly complicated idea, we seem to have concluded with the one that says “tax” one too many times. Sometimes the weekend has higher priorities than perfecting a Subject: line!

If you still want to read the weekly email newsletter, it’s free—and you’re getting your money’s worth! Subscribe here.

Wouldn’t you like to know what laws Congress has passed? Well, now there’s a place to see them!

The “New Laws” link on the “Bills” tab at the homepage. The bills are listed in order of their interest to you. The pages with the most activity are at the top.

Hopefully, this information improves your access to what Congress is up to!

(You can still see earmarks, though the earmark data was never complete. The “New Laws” link takes the place of the “Earmarks” link because earmarks are pretty well suppressed for the time being…)

I was pleased to be invited to do a podcast with the folks at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation about the addition of their BillTally data to our site. You can now learn much more about the costs of the bills in Congress, thanks to NTUF’s work.

You can give a listen to the podcast a couple of different ways:

On the NTU’s “Government Bytes” blog.

And on iTunes.

Or you can check it out right here:

We’re delighted today to announce the roll-out of a new feature on WashingtonWatch.com—actually, two new features. Both are designed to inform you better about what’s going on in Washington, D.C.

First, we’re adding lots of new cost data for the bills in Congress.

The folks at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation do cost estimates for many of the bills in Congress through their BillTally program. They have generously offered this information to us so we can share it with you. Many more bills now have cost estimates associated with them, so you can get a better sense of the dollar size and significance of the bills in Congress. (Here’s NTUF’s announcement.)

On our bill pages, you’ll see that we now identify the source of the cost estimates we use. Many still come from the Congressional Budget Office—Congress’ official budget, spending, and economics estimator—but now we have the National Taxpayers Union Foundation and a few other sources specified, such as congressional committee reports, which sometimes have spending information in them.

Second, we’ve added national debt figures to help you understand better how the bills in Congress fit into the overall budget picture.

On each bill with a cost estimate, you’ll also see how the bill affects the national debt. Many bills have little or no cost, and they don’t have any effect on the national debt. Many other bills are straight spending bills and they increase the national debt by as much as they spend. But some bills have tax and revenue measures in them that reduce their effect on debt or that bring down the national debt. (Bills can “cost” money in our main calculation while reducing the national debt because taxes “cost” taxpayers money while lowering debt.) Take a look at our “about” page for more on our cost calculations and what they mean.

We hope that this helps you judge what’s important in Congress. We appreciate the work of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation for making this information available to us. We hope you’ll pass the word to others about this resource so more Americans can get a handle on what is happening in Washington, D.C.