First Month of 117th Congress

At heart, I am a process person. I like to look at production rates and the numbers affecting them. It is almost a compulsion. So, with that in mind, lets look at the production rates of legislators in the 117^th Congress. NOTE: all numerical data in this post comes from using the ‘Advanced Search’ tool on Congress.gov.

The Data

The best production measure for congresscritters and their staffs, particularly in the first month of the session is the number of bills written. This month we had a total of 884 bills introduced: 719 in the House and 165 in the Senate. To better understand what that means we have to look at the historical record for the last seven sessions of congress, spanning now three administrations.

Congress	Session Bills	January Bills	House Bills	Senate Bills
117th Biden’s 1st	TBW	884	719	165
116th	17,886	1,463	1,093	370
115th Trump’s 1st	9,423	1,272	954	318
114th	14,604	1,171	730	441
113th	12,328	759	521	238
112th	14,762	904	618	286
111th Obama’s 1st	15,724	1,385	954	431

The ‘Session Bills’ provides the total number of bills written during that session of congress, that’s a null data set for the 117^th for obvious reasons. The ‘January Bills’ column provides the total number of bills introduced in Congress in the first January of the session. The ‘House Bills’ and ‘Senate Bills’ provides those number for each of the respective houses of congress.

The Analysis

The 116^th Congress was hands down the most prolific bill writing congress that we have seen. Having said that, statistically it is not an outlier; it is well within three standard deviations (actually, only 1.41σ) of the other six congresses we are looking at in the table. To be sure, the percent standard deviation for the total number of bills written is very high (18.9%), so we have a bill-writing ‘process’ that is not very well ‘in control’.

We see something interesting in the first-January bills number in comparison to the total bills written by that Congress. If bill production were equally spread out across the 24 months that a congress was in session, we would expect to see about 4.2% of the total bills written introduced in that first-January. What we actually see is somewhere between 6.l1% and 13.5%. That ‘13.5%’ is 2.04σ above the average of 8.5%, so it is not technically an outlier, but the average value would be significantly different without it being included: 7.5%. In any case, there are two reasons that the first-January numbers would be expected to be higher; new congresscritters getting their first priority bills written and the reintroduction of bills from the previous congress.

Another thing that stands out is the relatively low number of bills that were introduced in the Senate. The number for the House bills is within 0.42σ of the average while the Senate bills is 1.67σ from the average. If we look at the ratio of House bills to Senate bills (remember that there are 435 Representatives to 100 Senators) the lack of production in the Senate is even more apparent. This year’s ratio is 4.4 versus an average of 2.6 (yes, Senators are more prolific bill writers Representatives, if this were not so we would expect a ratio of 4.35); that is 2.07σ above average and the %Standard Deviation for this set of data is 31.16%, the highest of all the data points being looked at.

The problem with bill introduction in the Senate has apparently been related to organizational issues. With the 50:50 split between the two parties, there has been significant wrangling going on in the Senate leadership about how that body will be working during this session. Once the organizational agreement was reached on Monday, the 25^th, the legislative pipeline in the Senate opened with 118 bills (71.5% of the total) being introduced in the last week, comparative numbers in the House were 207 bills (28.8%). It will be interesting to see if the Senate’s bill writing pace catches up to that of previous congresses.