The Congressional Committee System
As we have been immersed over the past several weeks in the public hearings held by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (HJ6C) ( some hearing yesterday, right?), I thought this would be a good time to write about the Congressional Committee System and the functions performed by the various types of committees of Congress.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the committee system:
A congressional committee is a legislative sub-organization in the United States Congress that handles a specific duty (rather than the general duties of Congress). Committee membership enables members to develop specialized knowledge of the matters under their jurisdiction. As "little legislatures", the committees monitor ongoing governmental operations, identify issues suitable for legislative review, gather and evaluate information, and recommend courses of action to their parent body. Woodrow Wilson once wrote, "it is not far from the truth to say that Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work."
The committee system performs two important functions for Congress:
The system allows members of Congress to become experts in particular policy areas. It is impossible for every member of Congress to become an expert in the thousands of issues that are the subject of legislation. Members of Congress can spend their time focusing on the areas of specific concern to their committees while trusting the advice and judgment of colleagues who have specialized in other areas on other committees.
The system also allows Congress to multi-task. When Congress is in session, there are many committee and subcommittee meetings or hearings every day. As you’ll see below, committees continue to meet even when Congress is in recess. All members of Congress are assigned to multiple committees; when their committees or subcommittee meetings overlap, a member will assign staffers to attend or monitor the hearings the member is unable to attend in person.
There are several types of committees, each with separate responsibilities to the overall process of legislating.
Standing Committees
The “Standing Committees” are the most important committees of Congress. They are called “standing” because they are permanent – their existence persists from one legislative session to another unless the Congressional leadership wants to make a change. The standing committees do three things:
They consider bills and issues in their areas of jurisdiction for consideration by their respective chambers (House and Senate)
They provide oversight to agencies, programs, and activities within their jurisdictions. The standing committees in the Senate also have the responsibility for confirming presidential nominees to fill positions in the agencies they oversee.
They recommend funding levels – authorizations – for government operations and for new and existing programs. Importantly, only one standing committee in each house – the Appropriations Committee – actually passes appropriations to provide budget authority for federal agencies and programs.
Currently, the Senate has 16 standing committees and the House has 20 standing committees. Here’s a list of the standing committees for each house of congress (the committees in boldface type are the subject-area committees – sometimes called “authorizing” committees – most responsible for funding and monitoring government agencies; the committees in normal typeface are either overall spending committees or internal management committees):
Senate:
Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
Appropriations
Armed Services
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
Budget
Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Energy and Natural Resources
Environment and Public Works
Finance
Foreign Relations
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Judiciary
Rules and Administration
Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Veterans Affairs
House of Representatives
Agriculture
Appropriations
Armed Services
Budget
Education and Labor
Energy and Commerce
Ethics
Financial Services
Foreign Affairs
Homeland Security
House Administration
Judiciary
Natural Resources
Oversight and Reform
Rules
Science, Space, and Technology
Small Business
Transportation and Infrastructure
Veterans’ Affairs
Ways and Means
It’s not hard to understand how these committees work. I’ll give you one example and you can extrapolate to other Standing Committees.
Both houses have an Armed Services Committee. These committees deal with the Department of Defense, focusing on everything from spending priorities and approving nominees to high-level positions (the Senate does this) to investigating management issues within the department – including the actions of the military at home and abroad.
When any president submits a new budget proposal for an upcoming fiscal year, the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking officials in the department are usually asked to testify before both committees to answer questions about the proposed budget and any other issues members are concerned about. Because the committee members have spent years (and sometimes decades) focusing on issues related to the Defense Department, they have both the expertise and the institutional memory to ask the right questions of these government officials.
This is one reason why I oppose term limits for members of Congress; if they don’t have both broad and deep knowledge of the department, they’ll be snookered by the people from DOD who have spent their careers dealing with these issues.
When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, both Armed Services committees held “oversight” hearings, where they asked questions about the planning and implementation of policies that played out in horrifying detail on television.
The Budget Committees in both houses actually take the first action in response to a President’s budget proposal, by setting budget ceilings and providing a framework for the authorization and appropriations committees. These committees were established in the wake of the Watergate scandal in 1974. This committee has not worked well in recent years, failing to pass a “budget resolution” on time in recent years.
The Appropriations Committees in both houses play a critical role in funding the government. The authorizing committees (the ones in boldface on the lists above) establish priorities for the areas under their jurisdictions, make programmatic decisions, and set general funding levels. The Appropriations Committees are the place where legislation is passed actually giving agencies the power to spend money.
I used to explain it to my students this way: The various authorizing committees put the money in the bank; the appropriations committees give the agency the PIN that allows it to take the money out of the bank. This means that budgets actually have to go through two processes in each house – authorization and appropriations – before money can be spent.
Budgeting is complicated and has historically been the function of most legislative action in Congress. The bulk of the laws Congress passes are not the “make something legal or illegal” type of laws; they are about taxation and spending. The inability of Congress to pass money bills on time in recent years is a function of the unwillingness of many members of Congress to do the hard work behind closed doors rather than grandstanding or perpetually campaigning. (I wrote about this in more detail on March 16 of this year.)
The membership of each standing committee is determined at the beginning of each Congress by the leadership of the chamber, which will set the number of committees and subcommittees as well as their size and the ratio of majority to minority members on each panel. Special party committees in each house decide which members sit on which committees.
Members want to get seats on committees that will help their constituents; my Congressman, Rob Wittman, represents a district with a large number of military installations as well as a lot of both retired and active-duty military, so he has had a seat on the Armed Services Committee throughout his tenure in Congress. Members from farm states try to get on the Agriculture Committees, and members from large urban districts will find that they are best able to serve their constituents if they are on a committee dealing with housing, public transit, or poverty.
Most of the Standing Committees operate through subcommittees, which allow for even more specialization among the members. The House Armed Services Committee, for example, has seven subcommittees:
Tactical Air and Land Forces,
Military Personnel
Readiness
Seapower and Projection Forces
Strategic Forces
Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems
Intelligence and Special Operations
To continue the example: when the Defense Budget is introduced into Congress, it is referred to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees but is almost immediately split up into the sections relevant to the subcommittees. The subcommittees generally hold hearings on their parts of the bill before making a recommendation to the full Committee – which may then hold additional hearings before passing the bill out of committee to be considered by the full membership.
Special or Select Committees
A select or special committee of the United States Congress is a congressional committee appointed to perform a special function that is beyond the authority or capacity of a standing committee. A select committee is usually created by a resolution that outlines its duties and powers and the procedures for appointing members. Select and special committees are often investigative rather than legislative, though some select and special committees have the authority to draft and report legislation.
A select committee generally expires on completion of its designated duties, though it can be renewed. Several select committees are treated as standing committees by House and Senate rules and are permanent fixtures in both bodies, continuing from one Congress to the next. Examples include the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the House and the Select Committee on Intelligence in the Senate. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee is a select committee, though the word select is no longer a part of its name. some of these are called special committees – such as the Senate Special Committee on Aging. These committees do not pass legislation; if their investigations lead to legislative proposals, they are referred to the standing committee that has jurisdiction.
I used the Senate Special Committee on Aging to explain the purpose of these committees to my students. The concerns of an aging population – health care, housing, transportation, energy, nutrition, for example – cross standing committee jurisdictions and need to be studied together so that logical and mutually-supportive policies can be enacted.
We are all attuned to Select Committees these days, as this is the category for the HJ6C. It will expire at the end of this Congress (in January of 2023). If the Democrats retain control of the House, they may choose to renew the committee’s charter. If the Republicans take over, the committee will go away. The job of this committee is investigatory, but in a legislative rather than a law-enforcement sense. The responsibility of this committee is primarily to recommend legislative remedies to the correct standing committee and only secondarily to make law-enforcement recommendations to the Department of Justice or other law enforcement agencies.
Joint Committees
Joint committees are permanent panels that include members from both chambers; they generally conduct studies or perform housekeeping tasks rather than consider legislation. For instance, the Joint Committee on Printing oversees the functions of the Government Printing Office and general printing procedures of the federal government. The chairmanship of joint committees usually alternates between the House and Senate.
As of June 17, 2017, there were four joint committees: the Economic, Library, Printing, and Taxation committees.
The Joint Economic Committee employs some of the best economists on Capitol Hill; their analyses provide the economic assumptions that underpin much of the work of the authorizing and appropriations committees.
Conference Committees
A conference committee is a temporary, ad hoc panel composed of House and Senate conferees, formed for the purpose of reconciling differences in legislation that has passed both chambers. Conference committees are usually convened to resolve bicameral differences on major or controversial legislation. There is not a committee called “the Conference Committee;” rather, every time there is a difference between the House and Senate versions of a piece of legislation, a new conference committee may be established to solve the problem. Minor differences can be dealt with more simply, often through a series of phone calls or short meetings to resolve differences in language that do not have major policy implications. If the differences are significant, however, a Conference Committee for that piece of legislation is created.
Who sits on the conference committee? It’s always made up of the members of the Standing Committees in each house that considered the legislation in the first place – probably including the bill’s sponsors. This makes sense. These are the people who are most knowledgeable about the bill and are most likely to understand the points where compromise is possible and other points where compromise will be very difficult. Conference Committees are not supposed to add new items to a piece of legislation, but they sometimes do.
A Conference Committee works something like this, although this is of necessity a simplified explanation. The procedures followed by Conference Committees can vary widely, depending on the volatility of the issues under consideration, the other priorities facing the members of the Conference, the Congressional Calendar, national and world events, and the personalities and work styles of the members.
A Conference Committee may be called for if a bill is passed by both houses of Congress but there are significant differences in the bill. Because the Constitution mandates that a bill be passed in exactly the same form by both houses before it can be sent to the President, something has to be done to bring the two bills into line.
If this involves more than simple wordsmithing, the chairs of the two standing committees that originally considered the bill appoint members of their committees to serve on the conference committee. This is likely to include sponsors and cosponsors of the bill. The conference committee usually then holds an initial meeting to determine schedules and agendas.
Committee staffers then get to work, drafting charts that compare the two bills and highlighting areas of agreement and disagreement. Areas of agreement are put aside for the time being while areas of disagreement form the basis of the Conference Committee’s work. While this is going on behind the scenes, the members of the Conference Committee are continuing with their other legislative work.
The areas of disagreement highlighted by staff become the basis of discussion and compromise. The Conference doesn’t always meet in person to resolve issues; sometimes the staff is given authority to speak for the member of Congress to commit to legislative changes within certain parameters. When staffers believe that they have identified compromises that might be agreeable to all sides, they present this to the members of the Conference Committee. Sometimes this will be in a face-to-face meeting, but other times it might be through email or over the phone.
Throughout this process, interested parties – the President, executive agencies, and interest groups – are kept apprised of the progress made by the Conference Committee as they pressure the members of the Conference Committee to push for their desired outcomes.
This whole process can take months. When the Conference Committee has reached agreement among themselves about the provisions of the legislation, an official copy of the revised bill is presented to both houses. Each house then has the opportunity to approve or disapprove the compromise bill. There is a lot of pressure on the membership of each body to approve the Conference version of the bill, because to do otherwise would negate months of work by the people who know the issues best. Bills can die in Conference (when the members from both houses are unable to reach agreement) or they can die on the floor of either house after the Conference version of the bill has been submitted, but it is unlikely.
When the Conference bill has passed both houses, it is “enrolled” (meaning an official version of the bill is created) and sent to the President for his signature.
If you want to know the schedule of committee hearings in the house and senate, here are the websites you need to visit:
https://www.house.gov/legislative-activity
https://www.senate.gov/committees/hearings_meetings.htm
Here’s a screenshot of the schedule for today in the House of Representatives. Even though the House is currently in recess, this doesn’t mean that the work of the House is on hold. The work goes on.
The best way to understand the work of Congressional Committees is to become familiar with Congress’s “think tank,” the Congressional Research Service. The CRS publishes more than 700 reports every year, written by subject area specialists and available to members of Congress and staff as they go about their legislative business. CRS reports were made available to the public in 2018, so anyone can go on their website and access the information that members of Congress have. Before that, the primary way to get CRS reports was to make a request through your member of Congress. Here’s their website. Have fun. https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=&orderBy=Date
A number of CRS reports detail congressional operating procedures, including the congressional committee system, if you want to learn more.
Probably more than you wanted or needed to know, but that’s what I’m here for.
You're my favorite history/genealogy/government teacher.
I can see that you enjoy teaching. This column is clear and explanatory. There's a lot unpacked here that I never understood before. Thanks for the column and keep up the good work.
Gayla