Publishing pileup: Congressional bills are slow to reach the public

WASHINGTON — As members of Congress introduce more and more legislation in recent years, the public is waiting longer to see it.

The agency responsible for publishing bills has a backlog and can’t keep up with all the new ones rolling in, which means a delay before official text appears online.

“We were still processing the 118th bills, really through most of the month of January, while also processing the new stuff that came in for the 119th Congress,” said Hugh Halpern, director of the Government Publishing Office.

Lawmakers introduced roughly 19,000 bills and resolutions last Congress, while a decade earlier in the 114th Congress, the total was around 12,000. Add on other measures like amendments, and that amounts to a lot of legislative text.

“We’re … trying to do an increased volume of work with the same number of people we had right around the pandemic,” said Halpern of his agency’s specialized proofreaders.

Bills do not instantly appear online for the public to view the moment a lawmaker files them with the clerk; instead, they go through a rigorous process of proofreading and processing. GPO then posts the text to its own repository and also provides it to Congress.gov, the main digital database for the legislative branch that is run by the Library of Congress.

The turnaround time from introduction to publication online used to be quicker. In the 114th Congress, it took an average of four days for a bill to travel from the clerk’s desk to Congress.gov, according to Halpern. By the end of the 118th Congress, the average processing time had tripled to 12 days.

For members of the public hoping to read a recent proposal, the lag can be frustrating. But it has also drawn attention to a rising tide of bill introductions, the most since the 1970s.

Many of these are messaging bills, designed not to wind their way through committee and become law, but rather to grab attention or plant a flag.

Among the roughly 3,000 bills and resolutions introduced so far this Congress, House Republicans have rushed to offer symbolic support for President Donald Trump and rankle Democrats. Georgia Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, for example, introduced a bill that would authorize the president to negotiate the purchase of Greenland while renaming the island “Red, White and Blueland.”

A less colorful example would be one introduced by Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., which would prohibit oil company executives and lobbyists from being appointed to certain high-level positions in the executive branch.

“It’s not unusual to have messaging bills, but I think some of the technological changes … have sort of put this on hyperdrive,” said Joshua Huder, senior fellow with Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

“This is just a massive, massive explosion of legislation that we’re seeing,” Huder added. “And a lot of this has to do with the ease of introducing legislation, the technological changes have made it very, very easy, which is why GPO is having a hard time keeping up.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the House rolled out the eHopper, which allows bills to be filed electronically rather than in person. Named after the bin to collect paper on the clerk’s desk, this digital version acted as an accelerant. Now, even when the House is out of town, dozens of bills can still be filed online.

“In a pro forma week, you could count on basically one hand the number of things you would get from the House or the Senate,” said Halpern. “Now, it’s not at all unusual for us to get 50 or 100 or more measures during a pro forma. So my team doesn’t really have that time to catch up where we used to.”

As of Feb. 24, the agency had a backlog of about 1,100 total measures, but in recent years the heap of unprocessed legislation has been as large as 1,799, according to Halpern. House and Senate leadership can hotlist bills for overnight processing, but others have to wait in line.

The pool of new talent is shrinking across the publishing industry, Halpern said, which means staffing is a challenge.

“It used to be that GPO could recruit from The Washington Post or The Washington Times or other newspapers or other similarly situated folks to find proofreaders,” Halpern said. “Most of those areas have dried up. We can’t find journey-person proofreaders, so we have to grow them ourselves.”

An apprenticeship program brings recruits up to speed, but it takes two years before employees are fully trained, according to Halpern. And at least for now, artificial intelligence is not up for the task either, he said.

“AI is the buzzword du jour, (but) we haven’t found a tool that can substitute for our highly skilled proofreaders,” he said, adding that he hopes a sort of “Grammarly on steroids” could eventually help speed up rote tasks.

Congressional committee members with jurisdiction over GPO said they are aware of the issues the agency faces.

“During the 118th Congress, we worked with the House Clerk and GPO to allow easier tracking of edits to bill text, which ultimately helps the GPO process bills more quickly,” House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to work with the GPO and my colleagues on the Joint Committee on Printing to find creative ways to address the growing backlog of legislative measures.”

House Administration’s oversight plan for the 119th Congress includes the goals of supporting GPO’s apprenticeship program and working to “streamline” the legislative posting process.

Incentive structures at the Capitol have changed over time, experts point out, with large packages dominating much of the legislative action and leadership exerting more control.

“This is a predictable consequence of a heavily constricted legislative process where members have fewer and fewer opportunities to claim credit for legislative successes,” said Michael Thorning, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Structural Democracy Project.

“If you’re a member, and you come to expect that no matter what you do, you are not gonna have many opportunities for your bills to get considered or passed, then you are going to focus on other things that will get attention,” Thorning added. “And certainly, introducing a bill is a big channel.”

With many factors driving those incentives, the current trend seems unlikely to change overnight.

“It doesn’t seem like the answer is for Congress to introduce less legislation,” Thorning said. “And I don’t know how you would enforce that anyway. So that means the answer has to be in the capacity area. Some of that might be taking advantage of technological advances, but some of it might also just be more staff to handle the volume that legislators themselves are increasing.”

Once called the Government Printing Office, lawmakers renamed the agency to the Government Publishing Office in 2014, in deference to its increasingly digital mission. While skilled printers still run presses at GPO and produce a wide range of printed federal documents, its online publishing offers access and transparency to people around the country.

The agency, which also is responsible for producing the nation’s passports, received about $132 million in appropriations in fiscal 2024, which represented roughly a 10th of its total revenue. Halpern has asked congressional appropriators for a 3.1 percent funding bump in fiscal 2025.