19,249 Bills Were Introduced in the 119th Congress. 113 Became Law Under Their Own Number.
The Legislative Accountability Filter is a thirteen-stage map of what actually happens to a bill after it is introduced in Congress: where it moves, where it stops, and who controls that decision.
10,608 House bills and 5,551 Senate bills were logged. 16,431 were assigned to a committee and went no further. 1,324 were reported out. Eighteen failed cloture, of which four later became law by another route. The shrinkage from stage to stage is the finding.
The Delivery Record measures what members do with the bills that reach a vote. Most bills never reach one. This is the instrument for everything that happens before that — the committee burial, the scheduling block, the cloture failure. The process is not broken. It is working exactly as the people who control it intend.
The Capture Pattern panel sets a citizen-serving bill that sat in committee for 377 days against a capital-serving resolution that moved in 38 and was enacted. Same Congress, same rules, different sponsors, different outcomes.
Version 4.2, rebuilt 26 October 2026 from the frozen Q3 snapshot: govinfo BILLSTATUS, actions on or before 26 September 2026. Incorporation and omnibus figures are older and dated where they appear. One unreconciled pair is disclosed on the instrument itself. Nothing in it is scored, graded or ranked.
Prepared with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The research and the instrument are the author's own.
Comments