Not One of the 46 Committees of the 119th Congress Published a Goal Anyone Can Check
The Capture Index puts four questions to every committee of the 119th Congress, built from the public record. They are the questions an auditor puts to any system that makes consequential decisions.
Is the record right, and is all of it there? Before asking whether a committee did its job, ask whether it wrote down what its job was. None of the 46 states an objective for the 119th that anyone can test.
Can you rebuild what happened afterwards? This is the audit trail — what was decided, by whom, and who received the result. 17,631 of 19,249 measures never advanced from the committee they were referred to.
Who can get into the room, and is it logged? Here the people in the room are the control. No chamber publishes how many detailees are on loan to a committee, and no committee payroll shows them.
Who approved the change, and was the control still standing afterwards?
Pick a window, then a committee — or pick a committee and read it across all four windows in the same order.
Nothing here is scored, graded or added together. The conclusion is yours to draw. All 46 committee chair claims were verified against current committee membership data as of 26 September 2026; the donor and capture analysis is editorial and is labelled as such on the instrument.
Prepared with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The research and the instrument are the author's own.
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