Counting What Congress Passes

Laws: a count that fell 70% and is still open

Brookings’ Vital Statistics on Congress counts 906 public laws in the 80th Congress (1947–48), a peak of 1,028 in the 84th (1955–56) and 274 in the 118th (2023–24), the lowest of the 39 Congresses in Table 6-4 (Exhibit 9). The 112th Congress (2011–12) had held the low at 283 (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, 2026).

The 119th Congress is not in the Brookings table. The National Archives lists 124 public laws through P.L. 119-124, approved October 15, 2026, and the Congress ends on January 3, 2027, under the Twentieth Amendment. The last bar in Exhibit 9 is a partial count and does not belong in a ranking with completed Congresses.

A count can fall for reasons that leave the amount enacted unchanged. Two are documented. The first is commemorative law. Pew reports that the 101st Congress (1989–90) passed dozens of laws designating special observances, a practice largely ended by the 104th, and CRS reports that the House adopted a rule in the 104th Congress to limit date-specific commemorative measures. The second is consolidation: CRS describes omnibus appropriations acts, in which regular appropriations bills travel together, as an increasingly common way to close the appropriations cycle. Pew also noted in 2013 that the decline in volume since the 106th Congress had “coincided with increasing polarization” in both chambers. A count cannot separate these explanations.

A count also gives every law the same weight. Of the 124 laws in the 119th, 42 run one page and 80 run two pages or fewer (National Archives, public law listings). Twenty-four are one-page laws disapproving an agency rule or an act of the D.C. Council (National Archives). The longest runs 1,259 pages (National Archives).

Option: reauthorization calendars. Part of the count is extensions. Two laws approved April 18 and April 30, 2026, of two pages and one page, extended title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and each counts as a law (National Archives). CBO’s August 28, 2026 report identifies 1,447 authorizations of appropriations that expired before 2026, 512 of them tied to $494 billion in 2026 appropriations, and another 308 set to expire before the end of 2026. About half of the 1,447 expired at least a decade ago (CBO, 2026 Final Report).

A fixed calendar of reauthorization dates, or a sunset commission, would put those authorizations on a schedule. CRS summarizes the strongest case for it this way: reviews of many programs are sporadic, “an action-forcing mechanism” is necessary, and a commission would help Congress oversee programs. The strongest case against, also from CRS, is that mandatory reauthorization would “burden Congress with a tremendous workload” and may produce perfunctory reviews. CRS adds that by 1990, 12 of the 36 states with sunset laws had stopped using them. The April 2026 extensions illustrate a cost of hard deadlines: the first, P.L. 119-84, extended the authorities only through April 30, 2026, and a second law followed 12 days later (National Archives). Each adds one to the count and one or two pages to the statute. CRS’s report dates from 2011. It records sunset bills in every Congress since the 94th and one floor action, Senate passage of S. 2 in 1978 by 87–1 (CRS, RL34551).

Pages: the statute grew while the count fell

Table 6-4 also reports total pages of statutes for public bills enacted, drawn from the Statutes at Large: 2,236 in the 80th Congress and 4,350 in the 118th, a rise of 95%, after a peak of 8,742 in the 117th (Exhibit 10). The average law grew from 2.5 pages in the 80th to 24.5 in the 116th and 15.9 in the 118th (Brookings). Indexed to the 80th Congress, laws fell to 30 and pages rose to 195 (Brookings).

The page total moves with the calendar. The 116th Congress’s 8,432 pages include the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (2,124 pages, approved December 27, 2020) and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (1,481 pages, approved January 1, 2021; National Archives). The 118th’s 4,350 pages are fewer than half the 117th’s 8,742 (Brookings).

The mean also describes few laws. In each Congress from the 112th to the 119th the median law runs two pages, and the mean is set by a handful of long laws (National Archives, public law listings). Page counts depend on the printed format of the Statutes at Large, and we did not test whether that format changed over the period.

Option: page or readability limits. House rules require that the text of an unreported bill, or a draft committee report, be available for 72 hours before floor consideration (CRS, updated March 14, 2025). The clock is the same for a one-page law and a 1,259-page law. The strongest case for tying review time or format to length is arithmetic of our own, not a sourced finding: a fixed clock gives a 1,259-page law far less time per page than a one-page law. We located no source that measures it.

The strongest case against rests on enforcement and substitution. The availability rule can be waived by unanimous consent, by a two-thirds suspension vote, or by two special rules adopted by simple majority, which lets the House vote on a measure the day its text appears. A page cap could invite splitting a package into companion bills enacted together, leaving pages per bill lower and total pages unchanged. A page count is also not a count of provisions: a one-page law can disapprove an agency rule. We did not locate a CRS, CBO or GAO assessment of a statutory page cap.

Concentration: a few laws carry most of the pages

Exhibit 11 ranks the 119th’s longest laws through October 15, 2026. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 (P.L. 119-60, approved December 18, 2025) runs 1,259 pages, 40.9% of the 3,081 enacted (National Archives, public law listings). The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75, February 3, 2026) runs 567 pages and the reconciliation law, H.R. 1 (P.L. 119-21, July 4, 2025), 330 (National Archives). Together the three hold 70.0% (National Archives). Six laws of 100 pages or more hold 85.2% of pages and are 4.8% of the 124 laws (National Archives). The other 118 laws average 3.9 pages (National Archives).

The 119th is partial, so Exhibit 12 compares Congresses at the same point: laws approved by October 15 of the second year. The share of pages held by the three longest laws was 48.4% in the 112th, 46.9% in the 113th, 47.6% in the 114th and 39.8% in the 115th, then 56.6% in the 116th, 64.6% in the 117th, 67.0% in the 118th and 70.0% in the 119th, a rise from 39.8% in the 115th (National Archives, public law listings). At that cutoff the three longest laws were all NDAAs or appropriations acts in the 115th and 116th only. In the 112th, 113th, 114th, 117th, 118th and 119th one of the three was neither: respectively the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (P.L. 112-141), the Agriculture Act of 2014, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 and the reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21). Over full Congresses, the three longest laws of each Congress from the 113th through the 118th were all NDAAs or appropriations acts (National Archives).

Appropriations are needed every year, and CBO notes that defense activities have historically been reauthorized annually, so both kinds of vehicle recur on a fixed schedule. Other measures attach to them. CRS describes omnibus appropriations as a way to “bring action on the regular appropriations cycle to a close.” A 2023 study in The Forum, published by De Gruyter Brill, “Just How Unorthodox? Assessing Lawmaking on Omnibus Spending Bills,” examined omnibus appropriations acts signed from 2007 to 2016. It found 235 separate non-spending components, related to 374 standalone bills, and at least one standalone analogue for 94% of non-spending provisions (“Just How Unorthodox?”, The Forum, De Gruyter Brill, 2023).

Exhibit 13 shows what is still to come. In the 112th through 118th Congresses, 26% to 61% of laws and 23% to 52% of pages were approved after October 15 of the second year (National Archives, public law listings). In the 116th, 175 of 344 laws and 4,367 of 8,432 pages came after that date (National Archives). The 119th had 124 laws at that date, more than the 118th’s 106 at the same point and fewer than the 169 to 268 of the 112th through 117th (National Archives). The only law in the 119th’s listing with 2027 in its title is a 24-page continuing appropriations act (P.L. 119-103, approved September 2, 2026; National Archives). The data do not support a projection of the 119th’s final totals or its final concentration.

Option: committee-by-committee consolidation. Each authorizing committee would report one bill per Congress covering the expiring authorizations in its jurisdiction, in place of separate extensions and reauthorizations. The strongest case for it is that it moves work through vehicles that already carry it. CRS notes that the loss of debate and amendment in an omnibus “may be lessened” when the regular appropriations acts folded into it were previously passed by the House and Senate, and the 2023 Forum study, “Just How Unorthodox?” (De Gruyter Brill), finds that authorizing committees keep gatekeeping authority over add-ons. CRS’s analysis is of omnibus appropriations acts; it does not discuss the NDAA. The strongest case against is that it produces more of what Exhibit 12 shows growing. CRS names the “customary concern” with omnibus appropriations as “sacrificing the opportunity for debate and amendment for greater legislative efficiency,” and the same study finds that add-ons received less formal deliberation on average than other adopted bills.

Option: single-subject rules. Forty-three state constitutions have one, including every state admitted after 1844, and critics of omnibus legislation in Congress have pointed to the state rules as a model (a 2019 Albany Law Review article). The strongest case for it is that article’s account of its aim, “a noble vision of deliberative, majoritarian, and accountable law-making”: it forces separate votes on separate subjects. The strongest case against is the state record. The article finds that courts and commentators have not produced a clear and consistent definition of a “single subject,” that more aggressive enforcement would not clearly change legislative behavior, and that comprehensive multi-topic legislation is often essential for a legislature to act at all, so strict construction would yield “a proliferation of small, piecemeal measures.” A federal version could be adopted as a chamber rule, and chamber rules can be waived: the House can waive its 72-hour rule by a special rule adopted by simple majority (CRS, 2025). A federal analogue in the Senate is the Byrd rule, which lets a senator raise a point of order against extraneous matter in reconciliation bills such as H.R. 1 and takes three-fifths of the Senate to waive (CRS, updated September 28, 2022). It applies to reconciliation measures, not to the NDAA or appropriations acts.

Substantive and commemorative: what the count includes

Pew separates substantive from ceremonial laws. Substantive covers “anything that makes a change in federal law (however tiny) or authorizes the spending of taxpayer dollars (however few).” Ceremonial laws award medals, designate special days, authorize commemorative coins, rename post offices or otherwise memorialize. Pew calls its criteria “deliberately generous,” so a law counted substantive can carry little policy.

Its coding begins with the 101st Congress, but its text states a share for only five Congresses (Exhibit 14): 63% in the 101st, 64% in the 110th, 71% in the 114th, 69% in the 115th and 68% in the 116th (Pew, 2019; 2021). Two more are computed from Pew’s counts: 72% in the 113th (212 of 296 laws) and 73% in the 112th (208 of 283, where Pew states neither count: 208 is its 212 less four, and 283 is its 296 less 13; Pew, 2014). The 116th’s ceremonial share, 32%, was the highest since the 110th (Pew, 2021).

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codes each public law for a commemorative flag, defined as “commemorative in nature (e.g. proclamations for theme weeks like National Potato Week, naming a federal building after someone).” On that flag the share was 6% in the 88th Congress, rose to 43% in the 99th, fell to 12% in the 104th and was 30% in the 117th (Exhibit 15; CAP, Public Laws dataset). The House adopted its limit on date-specific commemoratives in the 104th Congress, but the flag does not isolate that rule: CRS reports that the rule appears to have reduced such measures in the 104th through 106th before they returned to pre-rule levels or higher, and the flag also covers building namings, which the rule does not limit. The flag fell from 31.8% in the 103rd to 11.7% in the 104th, and the series cannot separate the rule from other changes (CAP).

CAP and Pew agree within three points for the 101st, 112th, 113th, 114th and 116th, five of the six Congresses where both codings are usable (CAP; Pew). In one, the 110th, the two codings differ by 18 points: CAP’s flag reads 18% and Pew’s ceremonial share is 36% (CAP; Pew, 2019). We treat CAP’s flag count for the 111th (5 laws) and its 115th rows (88 more than the public laws) as unreliable, a judgment and not a source note, and leave those two Congresses blank in Exhibit 15.

The coding matters for long comparisons. From the 101st to the 117th Congress the count fell by 288 laws, from 650 to 362 (Brookings). On CAP’s flag, 150 of the 288 are flagged commemorative laws (258 to 108) and 138 are other laws (392 to 254; CAP). CRS counted more than 18,000 commemorative measures introduced and nearly 6,000 enacted or agreed to in the 93rd through 115th Congresses, about 19% of all measures enacted or agreed to. That figure includes simple and concurrent resolutions and is not a share of public laws.

We did not code the 119th. Pew’s October 15, 2026 analysis codes the 119th’s laws enacted through October 14, but as a count before Election Day, not a completed Congress’s share, so Exhibit 14 omits it. Coding the 119th would require reading each law, and the 24 one-page disapproval laws show the difficulty (National Archives). A page count gives them under 1% of the 119th’s pages, and a law count gives each the same weight as the 1,259-page NDAA (National Archives).

Two readings of the same decline

One reading treats the falling count as restraint. The then-Speaker of the House said, as Pew quoted the Speaker in 2013, that Congress “should not be judged on how many new laws we create, we ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.” Pew added that a repeal measure would itself count as substantive. On this reading the count is an input, and a lower input is neutral or better.

The other reading holds that the work did not fall and moved into larger bills. CRS names the “customary concern” with omnibus appropriations acts as “sacrificing the opportunity for debate and amendment for greater legislative efficiency”; it does not discuss the NDAA. Exhibit 16 sets the three measures side by side for the five consecutive Congresses, the 112th to the 116th, the only run with a Pew substantive count or share for every Congress alongside Brookings’ laws and pages. From the 112th to the 116th, pages rose 91%, laws 22% and substantive laws about 12%, so laws rose in the plotted window (Brookings; Pew). The three are not merged into one score, because any weights would be a judgment the data cannot supply.

The base year matters. The 112th is a low point: 283 laws and 4,415 pages, with pages 42% below the 111th’s 7,617 and laws 26% below its 383 (Brookings, Vital Statistics on Congress, 2026). Re-based on the 112th, the 118th is at pages −1% and laws −3%; re-based on the 111th, the 116th is at pages +11% and laws −10% (Brookings). The gap between laws and pages, and the direction of laws, depend on the window.

The consolidation reading has a defense. The 2023 Forum study, “Just How Unorthodox?” (De Gruyter Brill), describes omnibus add-ons as “a procedural adaptation,” in which rank-and-file members still place matters on the agenda and authorizing committees keep gatekeeping authority. It also finds that add-ons received less formal deliberation on average than other adopted bills. Both findings cover omnibus appropriations signed from 2007 to 2016, not the NDAA or reconciliation.

The data settle that laws and pages moved apart over the long run. Laws fell 70% from the 80th to the 118th while pages rose 95% (Brookings), and the share of pages in the three longest laws by mid-October of the second year rose from 40% in the 115th to 70% in the 119th (National Archives). The substantive share can be compared with laws and pages only in the 112th to 116th run, and that comparison depends on the base year. The data do not settle whether the amount of policy change fell. Neither a count nor a page total measures provisions or their effect, Pew’s share is a binary coding with generous criteria, and the 119th is open.

Each measure hides something the others show. The count hides length and concentration. Pages hide that most laws are short and that a one-page law can carry policy. The substantive share hides how much any one law does, and a full-Congress share is available for only seven Congresses (Pew). The 119th’s totals will be settled when the Congress ends on January 3, 2027, under the Twentieth Amendment, and the National Archives list will then support the law and page counts. The substantive share would still require coding each law.