The work of committees is central to the functioning of both the House and the Senate. Therefore, it is potentially useful to be able to take a broad view of how bills proceed (or fail to proceed) through those committees.
Analysts from the Congressional Research Service look at each bill and resolution and assign them terms from two controlled vocabularies: Policy Area terms and Legislative Subject Terms. The former is a broad overview of the topic of a bill (only one heading is assigned), while the latter is much more granular, though less easy to browse.
Using the bulk bill status system, information for individual bills is downloaded and analyzed. Progress of bills through the committee system is tracked and correlated with the policy areas and subject headings noted above. Finally, a series of Sankey diagrams are constructed with the resulting data.
For the sake of simplicity, only committees (and not subcommittees) are shown on the diagrams. As bill status data is manually downloaded, activity for the most recent congress may be slightly out-of-date.
Committee Flow is an experimental project of Ed Sperr, M.L.I.S.
Ed can be reached at ed_sperr@hotmail.com or esperr@uga.edu.
Committee Flow is powered by JavaScript and jQuery. The script for analyzing bill status data is written in Python. Govinfo does not have a public API as yet, so a custom webservice is used to fetch the JSON that provides the yearly counts. Google Charts is used to draw the charts and responsive layout is made easier with Bootstrap.
You can find the source code for this application at GitHub.
Please note that the information provided here comes ultimately from the Government Printing Office.
The code underlying this application is Public Domain, but if you use Committee Flow for publication, I'd appreciate a citation:
Sperr E. Committee Flow [Internet]. 2018 [cited your_date_here]. Available from http://esperr.github.io/committee-flow/
Want to have even more fun with visualization of congressional data? Check out Members by Interest and Congress by Year