1.2: Committees and Subcommittees

Other Information:

Like Americans' representation in Congress, lists of committees, their membership, and jurisdiction should be an easy lift. But it is not as easy as it should be to learn about the committees to which Congress delegates much of its work and the subcommittees to which the work gets further distributed. The Senate has committee names and URLs prominently available on its main website. The House does, too, at http:// house.gov/committees/. But neither page offers machine-readable information about committees and committee assignments. The Senate has a nice list of committee assignments, again, though, not machine-readable. The House requires visitors to click through to each committee's web page to research what they do and who serves on them. For that, you'd go to individual committee websites, each one different from the others. There is an authoritative list of House committees with unique identifiers, but it's published as a PDF, and it is not clear that it is used elsewhere for referring to committees. Without a recognized place to go to get data about committees, this area suffers from lacking authority. To the extent there are data, availability is not a problem, but machine-discoverability suffers for having each committee publish distinctly, in formats like HTML, who their members are, who their leaders are, and what their jurisdiction is. With the data scattered about this way, the Internet can't really see it. More prominence, including data such as subcommittees and jurisdiction, and use of a recognized set of standard identifiers would take this resource a long way. Until committee data are centrally published using standard identifiers (for both committees and their members), machine-readability will be very low. The Internet makes sense of congressional committees as best it can, but a whole lot of organizing and centralizing -- with a definitive, always-current, and machine-readable record of committees, their memberships, and their jurisdictions -- would create a lot of clarity in this area with a minimum of effort.

Stakeholder(s):

• •  (Performer)

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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