Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports are written by staff members at the Library of Congress and are intended for use by the members of Congress.   CRS reports are typically written to explain pending legislation, provide legislative histories, or give a general policy overview of an issue to a member of Congress. 

Until recently, CRS reports were not officially published anywhere and not all of them are available to the public, which can make older ones difficult to find. For current and recent reports, they are searchable on viewable at Congress.gov.

For older reports not available from CRS directly, there are other options:

Bloomberg Law has a collection of CRS Reports.

The Federation of American Scientists maintains an archive of defense-related CRS reports. It is no longer updated, but includes reports issued before they were widely publicly available.

CRS reports are also made available online from a number of organizations and libraries. Try searching "CRS Report and [title of report]" in Google or Worldcat.

Some additional free online collections of CRS reports include:

• Research Databases