What Congress Ran On, Tried and Did, 1947–2026

The ten parts

Part 1 · Promises and Passage. Compares what the party platforms promise with what Congress votes on and enacts: across 19 elections from 1948 to 2020, winning party platforms matched the topics of the next Congress’s House roll calls more closely than the topics of its laws, 66.9 against 55.0 on a 0 to 100 overlap scale (Exhibit 3; Comparative Agendas Project, platform, law and roll-call datasets).

Part 2 · Counting What Congress Passes. Counts laws and pages since 1947: 274 laws in the 118th Congress against 906 in the 80th (Exhibit 9; Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 6-4).

Part 3 · The Narrow Middle. Measures the distance between the parties and the size of the majorities: a House party gap of 0.91 in the 119th against 0.52 in the 80th (Exhibit 17; Voteview, member data).

Part 4 · Sixty Votes. Follows the Senate’s cloture threshold: 336 cloture motions in the 117th Congress against 54 in the 100th (Exhibit 24; U.S. Senate, Senate Action on Cloture Motions).

Part 5 · Who Writes the Bills. Measures committee capacity: 226 committee panels in the 119th against 314 in the 96th (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 4-1; Exhibit 32).

Part 6 · What Lasts. Examines the margins and afterlives of 16 landmark laws, 7 of which cleared their narrower chamber with 56.5% or less of the votes cast (Exhibit 43; House Clerk and U.S. Senate roll calls).

Part 7 · Moments on the Hill. Dates episodes credited with changing how Congress works, from the 76 days to cloture on the 1964 civil rights bill (U.S. Senate, The Civil Rights Act of 1964) to the Speaker’s removal in 2023 (House Clerk, roll call 519; Exhibit 54).

Part 8 · Which Bill Carried the Money. Shows how the annual appropriations bills were enacted: 188 of 192 bill-years from fiscal 2011 to 2026 in a package or under a full-year continuing resolution (GovInfo, Public and Private Laws).

Part 9 · Twelve Bills, None Enacted. Takes the FY2027 bills one by one: none is law, and the House has passed 3 (House Clerk, roll calls 175, 205 and 247; CRS R49353).

Part 10 · The Federal Funding Calendar, 2026 to 2031. Dates what expires and when, starting with the continuing resolution that funds the government through December 11, 2026 (P.L. 119-103; CRS R49353).

Fewer laws, longer laws, an unfinished count

The number of public laws is a common measure of what Congress does, and it has fallen. The 80th Congress enacted 906 and the 118th enacted 274, the fewest of the 39 Congresses in the Brookings series, a fall of 70% (Exhibit 9; Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 6-4). The count is also incomplete as a measure. Pages moved the other way: the 118th enacted 4,350 pages of public law against 2,236 in the 80th, and the average law grew from 2.5 pages to 15.9 (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress). In the 112th through 119th Congresses, the only ones for which this overview has page counts law by law, the median law runs two pages, so the growth in pages in those Congresses sits in a few very long laws (National Archives, previous sessions and current session public law listings). In the 119th, six laws of 100 pages or more hold 85% of the 3,081 pages enacted through October 15, 2026 (National Archives, 119th Congress, first session and second session public laws). Before the 112th the page counts are totals, so they cannot show whether the growth had the same shape.

Concentration is part of the story. In each Congress from the 112th through the 118th the three largest laws held 40% to 67% of the pages enacted through October 15 of the second year, and in the 119th the figure is 70%: the FY2026 defense authorization at 1,259 pages (41%), the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 at 567 pages (18%) and the reconciliation law, P.L. 119-21, at 330 pages (11%) (National Archives, previous sessions and 119th Congress public law listings). Indexed to the 80th Congress at 100, the 118th stands at 30 for laws and 195 for pages (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress). Fewer and longer laws could mean that Congress now bundles what it once passed separately; the page counts raise that question and do not answer it.

What a law count leaves out is what the laws do. Pew’s shares and counts put the substantive share of laws at 63% to 73% in the seven Congresses where its text states a share or gives counts to compute one, and the Comparative Agendas Project’s commemorative flag reads 6% of laws in the 88th Congress, 43% in the 99th and 30% in the 117th (Pew Research Center, 2014, 2019 and 2021; Comparative Agendas Project, Public Laws dataset). No source codes the full series, so this series cannot say how much of the fall in the count is a fall in substance. The 119th Congress is also not finished: it had enacted 124 laws through October 15, 2026 with its lame-duck session still to come, and in the 112th through 118th Congresses 23% to 52% of a Congress’s pages were enacted after October 15 of its second year (National Archives, current and previous sessions public law listings).

Parties that separated, majorities that thinned

On Voteview’s first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores, the gap between the Republican and Democratic party means in the House rose from 0.52 in the 80th Congress to 0.91 in the 119th, and in the Senate from 0.48 to 0.92 (Exhibit 17). Of the 86 Congresses with a Republican-coded member, from the 34th (1855), the 80th has the lowest House gap and the fifth-lowest Senate gap; between the 35th and the 79th the House gap reached 0.84 in 1895 and the Senate gap 0.81 in 1899, and the 119th is above every earlier value except the House’s 34th, which had one Republican-coded member (Voteview, member data). Since the 95th Congress the Republican mean moved further than the Democratic mean in both chambers. The overlap that once existed has closed on this measure: in the 80th Congress, 37% of House Democrats and 49% of Senate Democrats scored to the right of the most liberal Republican in their chamber, and since the 108th Congress in the House and the 109th in the Senate none has (Voteview, member data).

Most of the widening is on the Republican side of the ledger. Measured from the 95th Congress (1977–78), the Republican mean moved 0.26 to the right in the House and 0.29 in the Senate, while the Democratic mean moved 0.08 and 0.05 to the left, so Republican movement accounts for 76% of the House widening and 86% of the Senate’s; measured from the 80th it is 61.5% and 59.9%, so the share depends on the base (Voteview, member data). The overlap in the 80th Congress had a regional source: 64 of the 72 House Democrats to the right of the most liberal Republican, and 18 of the 23 in the Senate, came from Confederate states, 89% and 78% of the overlap (Voteview, member data). Voteview describes DW-NOMINATE as assuming a static position across a career, so on that measure a party mean changes only when different people serve. Nokken-Poole scores let a member’s position change by Congress: on them, continuing House members account for 30% of the widening since the 95th Congress and continuing senators offset 24% of it, so replacement accounts for the rest of the House widening and for more than all of the Senate’s (Voteview, member data).

Majorities are narrow at the same time. On the House Historian’s initial election results the 119th House had a majority of 5 seats (220 to 215), the smallest of the 40 Congresses since 1947 and against 57 in the 80th; CRS’s opening-day count excluding Delegates gives 4. Gallup measured approval of Congress at 16% on September 1–17, 2026, with 79% disapproving, and the lowest reading in its series is 9% in November 2013.

The vote tables for landmark laws show a similar shift. Of the 16 laws examined in What Lasts, seven cleared their narrower chamber with 56.5% or less of the votes cast, all of them since 2010: the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, the 2017 tax act, the 2021 infrastructure law, CHIPS and Science, the Inflation Reduction Act and P.L. 119-21 (House Clerk and U.S. Senate roll calls). On the Senate votes for the last two, which were 50–50, the Vice President broke the tie, and the shares do not count it. The other nine cleared both chambers with at least 68.2% on the recorded votes, four of them resting on partial records such as voice votes (Exhibit 43; House Clerk and U.S. Senate roll calls). In the House, the less supportive party gave the seven narrow laws 11.4% or less of its votes, and none on four of them; for the four earlier laws with a party table it gave 49.7% or more (House Clerk, roll calls). The 16 laws are a count chosen for that study, not a sample, so the comparison shows what happened to these laws and not what would have happened under other rules. A 2019 study of all laws enacted from 1973 to 2016 found enacting coalitions nearly as bipartisan as in the 1970s, and five of the seven narrow laws were enacted after 2016, outside that sample (Perspectives on Politics, 2019).

A threshold that moved by precedent

The Senate’s cloture threshold for legislation has been three-fifths since 1975, normally 60 votes (Exhibit 24; CRS R43331). Cloture motions filed rose from 54 in the 100th Congress to 336 in the 117th, and the 119th had 294 through October 1, 2026 (U.S. Senate, Senate Action on Cloture Motions). Most of the recent filings are on nominations: 229 of the 294, against 65 on legislation, and the 65 compare with a peak of 138 legislative motions in the 110th Congress (U.S. Senate, cloture motions by Congress). Nominations made up 74% to 85% of filings in every Congress from the 115th through the 119th, and since the 2013 and 2017 precedents a majority can end debate on them (U.S. Senate, cloture motions by Congress; CRS R43331 and R44819).

Those changes came by precedent, not by amending the rule. In each case a majority declined to sustain the chair’s ruling: 52 senators on November 21, 2013, 52 on April 6, 2017, 53 on September 11, 2025 and 52 on September 17, 2025, the last two to allow en bloc packages of nominations (U.S. Senate, roll calls 242 of 2013, 109 of 2017, and 515 and 524 of 2025). Legislation still needs 60. In the 119th Congress, 15 legislative measures failed cloture at least once with more yeas than nays, seven of them in 2026 with 47 to 57 yeas, and when cloture on legislation is invoked the median vote is 82 yeas (U.S. Senate, cloture motions and roll call votes, 119th Congress, 1st and 2nd sessions). Reconciliation, which needs a simple majority, produced 25 laws from 1980 through 2026: 19 in the 96th through 110th Congresses and 6 in the 111th through 119th, so the count does not show a shift toward it (CRS R40480).

Failure at the threshold is higher than in the last two complete Congresses but not unprecedented. Through October 1, 2026, 44 of 71 legislative cloture votes in the 119th Congress failed, 62%, against 17 of 45 (38%) in the 117th and 11 of 30 (37%) in the 118th, and 78% in the 100th (32 of 41) and 81% in the 104th (39 of 48) (U.S. Senate, cloture motions by Congress). These are counts of votes, and a measure can be voted on more than once. Five en bloc resolutions adopted from September 2025 through July 2026 confirmed 375 nominations in packages (U.S. Senate, roll call votes, 119th Congress, 1st and 2nd sessions).

Moments on the Hill, a study of selected episodes, gives a longer record. In 1964 the Tonkin Gulf Resolution drew no House votes against the President and 2.2% of the Senate’s; in 1973 the War Powers Resolution became law over a veto, with 67.8% of House members and 80.6% of senators voting against the President (Voteview, House vote 197 of the 88th Congress; U.S. Senate, Chairman J. William Fulbright and the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution and Vetoes by President Richard Nixon). In the House, a motion to vacate the Speakership passed 216–210 on October 3, 2023, with 208 Democrats and 8 Republicans in favor (House Clerk, roll call 519). In 1964 the Senate took 76 calendar days from making the civil rights bill pending business to invoking cloture on it (U.S. Senate, The Civil Rights Act of 1964). The same study dates four inquiries from final report to the first law or rule change it tracked and finds no fixed clock: 365 days before the report for the 1932–34 banking inquiry, 110 days after for Watergate, 20 days after for the 1975–76 intelligence inquiry (a Senate resolution) and 1,366 days after for Iran-Contra (U.S. Senate, banking, Watergate, intelligence and selected investigations pages; GovInfo, S. Rept. 73-1455, P.L. 93-443 and P.L. 102-88). Four remembered inquiries are not a sample, and the lags do not show that the hearings caused the changes.

Less machinery behind each bill

The number of committee panels in Congress fell from 314 in the 96th Congress (1979–80) to 226 in the 119th, which is still in progress, 28% fewer as published (the House from 193 panels to 136 and the Senate from 130 to 94) (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 4-1). The 96th total includes ten House task forces; without them the fall is 25.7% (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Chapter 4). Committee and subcommittee meetings in both chambers fell 73%, from 10,823 in the 96th to 2,875 in the 118th (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Chapter 6). Over the same years members introduced more bills and joint resolutions: 16,554 bills and joint resolutions in the 118th against 12,583 in the 96th (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Chapter 6). Public laws fell from 613 to 274 over those two Congresses, so laws per 100 bills and joint resolutions introduced went from 4.9 to 1.7 (Exhibit 36; Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress; CRS 96-727). Each panel also met less often: House meetings per panel fell from 36.4 in the 96th Congress to 12.9 in the 118th, and Senate meetings per panel from 29.2 to 11.9 (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, Chapter 4 and Chapter 6).

These series move together; they do not show why. The data do not distinguish among explanations such as more introductions that were never meant to pass, bargaining over fewer and longer vehicles, or less capacity to write bills. Who Writes the Bills reports the staff and funding series behind that last reading and its limits, including a break in the way committee staff are counted.

After passage: amended, extended, stalled

Of the 16 landmark laws in What Lasts, 15 have since been amended, extended or partly repealed by a later statute and five have been before the Supreme Court in the sources that study opened, with none of those rulings striking a law down whole; two further cases are known and were not counted. A count that close to universal cannot separate narrow laws from broad ones: six of the seven narrow laws and all nine broad ones were changed, and the nine have had far longer to be reopened, roughly 6 to 91 years against roughly 1 to 16 for the seven (What Lasts, from the roll calls and statutes it lists law by law). Ten of the 16 have a dated expiry, depletion or extension, or a funding cut, in the sources opened (What Lasts). The 2026 Trustees, in reports released June 9, 2026, project the Social Security retirement fund depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, with 78% of scheduled benefits then payable (Social Security Administration, A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports).

Authorizations lapse as well. The Congressional Budget Office counts 1,447 authorizations of appropriations that expired before 2026; 512 of them were associated with $494 billion of FY2026 appropriations, and 308 more expire during 2026 (Congressional Budget Office, Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations: 2026 Final Report, August 28, 2026). Reauthorizing surface transportation has meant short extensions: each of the six acts from 1991 through 2021 had at least one, from 1 to 12 per act and adding 3 to 33 months, the most for the 1998 act (12 extensions over 23 months) and the 2005 act (10 over 33 months) (CRS R48937). The count for the 2021 act is as of September 11, 2026.

Funding is where deadlines repeat. CRS counts 23 funding gaps since fiscal 1977, and the three longest, at 75, 42 and 34 days, began in 2018 or later (Exhibit 58); its count does not include the separate 116-day lapse in Border Patrol and ICE funding that another CRS report lists. The current continuing resolution, P.L. 119-103, provides funding through December 11, 2026 (CRS R49353).

The annual bills show the same pattern in the current cycle. As of October 17, 2026, none of the 12 FY2027 appropriations bills is law (CRS R49353; National Archives, current session public laws). The House has passed 3 of them (Military Construction-VA on May 15, Agriculture-FDA on June 4 and National Security-State on July 15), and P.L. 119-103 funds all 12 at FY2026 rates through December 11 (House Clerk, roll calls 175, 205 and 247; CRS R49353). The FY2026 annual bills were completed on April 30, 2026 (P.L. 119-86), after three funding lapses; Border Patrol and ICE were funded on June 10 by a reconciliation law, P.L. 119-98 (CRS R49353 and R49105). Twelve Bills, None Enacted (Part 9) takes the bills one by one, Which Bill Carried the Money (Part 8) covers how the bills have been packaged since fiscal 2011, and The Federal Funding Calendar (Part 10) dates the deadlines ahead.