The Congressional Data Task Force held its second quarterly meeting of 2025 on June 10. The agenda for the meeting can be found here and the video here. The Congressional Hackathon will serve as its next meeting and will be held in September, date TBD.
June’s meeting previewed two very useful resources in development by the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) for congressional staff that were recommended by the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
One is called CaseCompass, a portal for House offices to use to aggregate trends in casework across the country so they can contextualize specific problems raised in their district against a national picture. The prototyped dashboard allows users to filter by specific federal agency and issue area. It also can filter turnaround time on cases by department or agency, revealing constituent service bottlenecks in federal offices.
Because caseworkers use different tagging systems in recording constituent requests, the development team relied on a working group of caseworkers to develop a single list of agency programs, issue areas, and inquiries to form the basis of the platform. Placing that information in a single spreadsheet alone is a valuable reference for new caseworkers. The team also has developed a tool that uses sample text generated by AI to see if they are tagging cases correctly.
CAO also revealed its internal staff directory called LegiDex, which soft launched several weeks ago after a year of work. It is available internally at legidex.house.gov. Although the directory pulls from official data sources, staff can update their contact information manually as well. It includes issue areas covered by legislative staff, which remains a work in progress because of differences in taxonomy across offices.
The directory is adding staff contacts at legislative branch agencies, but adding Senate staff is a bit complicated because the chamber grants senators and committees control of their own data. Until congressional leadership decides otherwise, the tool is behind the congressional firewall.
The Government Publishing Office is nearing the launch of digital versions of the US Reports, the bound record of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to 1790. GPO also is expanding access to House and Senate amendments in the Congressional Record prior to 2021 and has incorporated bill numbers from 1783 to 1903 in the MODS XML metadata for the statutes at large collection. (GPO thanked Josh Tauberer for his help in sharing bill numbers from 1789-1903). Digitization of the entire US Serial Set, composed of House and Senate documents and reports back to 1817, is now more than half-way completed. It is expected that the process will take another 3-4 years.
The Library of Congress has added exchanges or letters between committee chairs on a piece of legislation to congress.gov. These letters are published in the official record to preserve committee jurisdiction on bills that a committee forgoes floor consideration or discharge from further consideration that are managed by another chair on the floor.
The Library also thanked the House Digital service for help in mapping data from 2025 House committee meeting records to the corresponding video file in congress.gov, a technical fix that made work much quicker for the Congressional Research Service. It has added 400 videos from House committee meetings in 2025 to congress.gov. Videos from before 2025 have not been mapped and fully incorporated into Congress.gov.
Public access to congressional video remains a major focus of the working group. The public can watch the House floor live on YouTube thanks to the Clerk’s Office. So far, the livestream has recorded 517,000 views. The working group examining how to integrate video recordings into congress.gov, meanwhile, is considering several storage options and standards for system streaming requirements.
The Senate is refreshing its website, adding new features and headers to help users navigate and highlight special features. The development team is balancing the needs of Senate and public users. The report of the congressional video task force is completed and they are exploring different storage options for including data on congress.gov. In addition, the comparative print suite is available as a pilot to Senate staff.
The Clerk’s Office is continuing a study into developing a legislative drafting platform for the House, interviewing staff about needs and requirements in the first step of design.
As the appropriations season lingers, Daniel Schuman presented the group with 66 proposals supportive of congressional innovation in FY2026. They range from Congress-wide solutions, chamber-specific proposals, and ideas for Legislative Branch agencies. He also shared a set of tech project ideas for Congress.
The Internet Archive shared an offer to help digitize physical materials at no cost to Congress.
