The Congressional Data Task Force held its first quarterly meeting of 2025 on March 11. As always, video of the meeting and the slides from presenters are available on the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub.
The meeting noted the publication in December of an end-of-session report by the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Modernization, which was organized to oversee implementation of the remaining recommendations of the House Select Committee on The Modernization of Congress. It is a useful reference for innovation activity in the House during the 118th Congress, handily organized by theme. In the 119th Congress, the Subcommittee carries on under the banner of Modernization and Innovation, but has not yet published any new material like the quarterly flash reports on artificial intelligence strategy and implementation in the House it did the last two years.
On to a summary of the meeting, which provided updates on many ongoing projects:
The long-awaited internal congressional staff directory, LegiDex, progressed as a pilot involving 1,2000 House users. Developing the tool, Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) staff said, was improving the data otherwise available from vendors. For the rest of us, unfortunately, the directory will not be public. Relatedly, CAO staff noted finding good quality photos of members of Congress for web publication proved to be a challenge, and a working group was created to provide a reliable source for them.
Electronic voting in House committees is now a reality, as a chamber rules change allowed it and the CAO signed a service agreement for the technology. As of the meeting, 11 committees had started using the service and another two were interested in adoption. Members are happy with its ease of use and how it’s speeding up committee processes. The tally sheet on the House Clerk’s website, however, remains the official record. Eventually, committee vote data will be published publicly, either on the Clerk website or directly to congress.gov.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the House discovered that when it wanted to develop a colleague letter drafting and sign-on tool, the Senate had been using its own called Quill for years. The House Digital Service brought it over to the chamber and every freshman office of the 119th Congress is enrolled in it. House offices can cut and paste staffers who have used Quill on the letter so they can follow up. In four years, 21,000 letters have been created and shared with the tool, including 9,000 in the House.
The House Clerk’s office has begun a study of developing a legislative drafting tool, for which it received some modernization initiative account money.
The Senate and Government Publishing Office are collaborating on improving the Senate’s website, particularly the quality of its landing page and the ability to open and collapse different sets of information.
Office of Law Revision Counsel also is working with GPO to ensure USLM 2 output of an XML editing tool OLRC is developing prints like what it should look like.
Digitization of historical congressional data remains a major project for GPO, which provided updates on its US Congressional Series, statutes at large, and US Reports of the Supreme Court collection projects. Public access to the US Reports, the official bound source for Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790, should come online this summer. For those interested in these projects, GPO publishes regular updates for the US Congressional Series and other digital releases.
University of Maryland journalism professor Derek Willis demonstrated how he used an LLM to convert his collection of ten years of House job listings from PDFs into structured data, so they can be analyzed. He is validating the accuracy of the conversion and noted a similar project to organize congressional financed travel documents had better than a 98% accuracy rate.
The Library of Congress improved how Congressional Research Service materials are published on Congress.gov and are now making the most recent version available by API. CRS reports, infographics, and testimony to congressional committees are included in the release and feature links to legislation referenced by authors. All active and archived CRS reports are included in this release and previous versions of revised reports should be available in June. They are also available by API. Note, this does not include historical CRS reports, of which tens of thousands exist but are not easily available to Congress or the public.
There is no capability to search by author and CRS sidestepped the request to form a user group as a decision CRS leadership would have to make.
