What Items Are Due to Congress: August 2021

Congress regularly requests reports on strengthening Congress but there’s no central place to keep track of what they’ve requested.

To help keep track of things, we built a public spreadsheet that maintains a catalog of projects, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

The catalog covers reforms and requests ordered by the House and Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittees, the Committee on House Rules, and the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. At the moment, the catalog includes major resolutions and measures: H. Res. 8, the House Rules for the 117th Congress, Legislative Branch Appropriations FY 2021, and H.Res. 756 from the 116th Congress.

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We continue to update this list each month for what’s due and what’s outstanding. Here are the February, March, and April, May, June, and July editions.

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What Items Are Due to Congress: July 2021

Congress regularly requests reports on strengthening Congress but there’s no central place to keep track of what they’ve requested.

To help keep track of things, we built a public spreadsheet that maintains a catalog of projects, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

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What Items Are Due to Congress: May 2021

Congress regularly requests reports on strengthening Congress but there’s no central place to keep track of what they’ve requested.

To help keep track of things, we built a public spreadsheet that maintains a catalog of projects, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

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We continue to update this list each month for what’s due and what’s outstanding. Here are the February, March, and April editions.

Due In May

This month has zero items that are due. You can see below what reports are past due and have yet to be publicly released.

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What Items Are Due to Congress: April 2021

Congress routinely requests Legislative branch support offices and agencies provide reports to Congress on their activities, but there’s no central place to keep track of what they’ve requested.

So, we built a public spreadsheet that maintains a catalog of projects, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

The catalog covers reforms and requests ordered by the House and Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittees, the Committee on House Rules, and the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. At the moment, the catalog includes major resolutions and measures: H. Res. 8 (the House Rules for the 117th Congress), Legislative Branch Appropriations FY 2021, and H.Res. 756 from the 116th Congress. We continue to update this list each month for what’s due and what’s outstanding. Here are the February and March editions. Scroll down to see April’s.

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What Items Are Due to Congress: March 2021

Congress regularly requests reports on strengthening Congress but there’s no central place to keep track of what they’ve requested. So we are keeping track so you don’t have to.

We built a public spreadsheet that maintains a catalog of projects, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

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We continue to update this list each month for what’s due and what’s outstanding. Here is the February edition. Scroll down to see March’s.

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What Items Are Due to Congress: February 2021

Congress routinely requests reports on modernizing Congress but there’s no great place to keep track of what they’ve requested. So we are keeping track so you don’t have to.

We built a catalog of projects and their due dates that we are maintaining in this public spreadsheet, broken down by item due, entity responsible, and due date.

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November Update: What Items are Due in the Modernization Committee Resolution

In early March, the House passed H.Res 756, adopting modernization recommendations of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. The resolution included 29 recommendations that were unanimously reported by the Fix Congress Committee in 2019. The resolution called on legislative support offices to start a number of projects and report back on how to implement others.

Last week, the Committee on House Administration released a series of congressional reports that were due in H.Res 756. We continue to catalogue the projects and their due dates into a public spreadsheet, and have them broken down by items.

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A Brief Recent History of Unionization in Congress

Working conditions for Congressional staff have recently been prominent in the news. News stories recount staff shamed by their offices for wanting to wear masks in the face of COVID-19 or being unnecessarily forced into their offices. Congressional staff are also significantly underpaid compared to their Executive branch (or historical) counterparts; their health insurance has been used as a political football; and they have less recourse when they’re subject to harassment or other mistreatment in the workplace.

The traditional response by staff to difficult working conditions is to unionize. But can Congressional staff unionize like their Executive branch counterparts? Continue reading “A Brief Recent History of Unionization in Congress” →

Foresight: A Tool for a Proactive Government

Someone on the Hill once told me that Congress was “constitutionally reactive.” That is, Congress and the law would always lag behind society, and the system was intentionally designed that way. The current rapid pace of change — in our culture and particularly with technology — only makes the gap between policy and our lives more glaring.

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Foresight in the Federal Government

In “Strategic Foresight in the Federal Government: A Survey of Methods, Resources and Institutional Arrangements,”[1] authors Joseph Greenblott, Thomas O’Farrell, Robert Olson, and Beth Burchard analyzed foresight activities in 19 federal agencies (18 in the Executive Branch and 1 in the Legislative Branch). This article summarizes the findings (all numbers and quotes are from that article).

While approaches varied by agency, some common themes emerged.[2] Overall, Defense and Intelligence agencies seemed to have the strongest (and best funded) foresight practices.[3] Foresight in the Executive Branch is much further developed than in the Legislative Branch.

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