A running total over real time: the x-axis is days elapsed in the session, not stages. Each colored layer is bills that had, by that day, died at that specific stage — stacking up as more bills resolve. Blue is bills already introduced but not yet resolved as of that day. At the far right, the surviving sliver splits into what became law (green) and what was vetoed (red). Hover or click a layer for detail.
Day 0 to day ~730 spans the full 118th Congress, January 3, 2023 to January 3, 2025. That's the entire timeline here — bills don't carry over between Congresses, so nothing before or after this window is part of this dataset.
Hover a flow for detail. Gray branches are bills that died at that stage.
Bars are days from introduction to a bill's last recorded action, not time until Congress ended. A bill that died in committee usually stopped moving within days or weeks of introduction — it just never got another action recorded after that. Click a legend item to isolate or hide an outcome — useful since early committee deaths otherwise dwarf everything else.
Each dot is one bill: x is when it was introduced during the Congress, y is how many days later its last action was recorded. Zoomable: scroll or pinch over the chart, or use the +/− buttons above; drag to pan once zoomed in. Click a dot to identify it.
Where the 274 enacted laws were sponsored from — not who they
affect. Most federal law applies nationwide regardless of the sponsor's home state. Click a policy area
or party below to highlight its states on the map.
How this is built
Every bill introduced (HR, S, HJRES, SJRES — the
types that can actually become law) is classified by the furthest stage its most recent recorded
action reaches. Since a bill's latest action only shows where it currently sits, not its full
history, this is an approximation, not an exact parse of every bill's full action history —
documented caveats are on the experiment page.
The impact map shows which state's congressional delegation sponsored each enacted law, not
who the law actually affects — congress.gov has no field for real-world geographic impact, and most
federal law applies nationwide regardless of the sponsor's home state. A bill's actual appropriated
dollar amount is still left out entirely: congress.gov doesn't return a structured funding figure for
most bills, and neither titles nor summaries reliably state one, so showing a real number here would
mean guessing.
The cost figures shown per bill and per group are a different, much rougher thing: an illustrative
"full-attention" estimate of congressional labor time, not a real cost. It's the sponsor's own time
plus an assumed committee's time, each valued at the public base Member salary
($174,000/year, per congress.gov's own CRS salary report)
over the bill's tracked duration — effectively treating the bill as if it had that committee's
undivided attention for its entire lifespan, which no bill actually gets. Read it as an upper bound,
not a minimum: members work many bills at once, so the real time spent on any one bill is almost
certainly far less than this figure suggests. Committee size is an assumption, not a roster —
congress.gov has no endpoint listing who sits on a given committee, so this uses a flat estimate per
chamber (40 for House, 22 for Senate), anchored to four real, verified committee sizes (House
Judiciary 44, House Appropriations 63, Senate Judiciary 20, Senate Appropriations 27); an individual
bill's actual committee could be far smaller or larger. No leadership salary premium is applied.
"Ceremonial/commemorative" vs. "substantive" is a title-pattern heuristic, not a judgment about
whether a law was good policy: facility and route namings, Congressional Gold Medals, and
commemorative coins or sites are ceremonial; everything else — including narrow or minor bills
— counts as substantive by default, so that bucket isn't overstated.
The "funded" badge means the bill is an appropriations act by its own title — a category, not a
dollar amount. It says nothing about the size of any other bill's funding, only whether that
particular bill's stated purpose is to appropriate money.
Each enacted law's short description is the opening line of its official Congressional Research
Service summary — the version written when it became law, not an earlier as-introduced draft.
"Bundles N divisions" is a real, structural fact pulled from that same summary's own "DIVISION A",
"DIVISION B" headings, not an editorial judgment: it's the closest honest signal to what people mean
by "riders" without this site deciding which individual provisions do or don't belong. Most bills
have exactly one division and show no such note.
Data source: congress.gov API.
Fetched at build time, not live in your browser.