The Senate in early June failed to advance two bills meant to prevent this imminent increase in rates. A bill backed by Democrats would extend the current interest rate for two years, and offset the cost by ending three tax breaks. A GOP bill would peg all newly issued student loans to the U.S. Treasury 10-year borrowing rate plus 3 percentage points. Given the current Treasury rate of 1.75 percent, a student taking out a loan this coming school year would pay 4.75 percent for the life of the loan under this proposal. The Democrats’ bill garnered 51 votes, shy of the 60 needed to end debate, while the Republican proposal failed 40 to 57.

Meanwhile, the House in May passed a different Republican plan in a 221 to 198 vote, largely along party lines. This plan would permanently fix the problem by tying the student loan interest rate to the 10-year Treasury rate plus 2.5 percent. The bill would also reset the rate every year, though students could consolidate their loans into a fixed rate after graduation, and it would cap this rate at 8.5 percent.

The bills that have been voted on are among numerous measures put forward to deal with this political hot potato. House members have introduced bills to extend the 3.4 percent rate for another year (Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)), two years (Reps. Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX)) or four years (Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) have proposed to key the student loan rate to the rate the Federal Reserve charges banks for very short-term loans, currently 0.75 percent.

Other lawmakers have tackled the interest rate issue as part of a broader reform of the federal student loan system. Thus, Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) has filed a bill to calculate loan repayments based on the borrower’s salary, while also fixing the interest rate to the 10-year Treasury rate plus 3 percent. Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) has introduced the Student Loan Fairness Act, which, among other things, would permanently cap the interest rate for all federal student loans at 3.4 percent.

The potential change in interest rates on subsidized student loans has its origins in a 2007 bill intended to boost college aid. In addition to increasing grant amounts to students and improving access to student loans, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act established a stepped reduction in interest rates. Beginning in July 2008, the rate was lowered over the course of four years from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent, and was supposed to revert to 6.8 percent in July of last year.

Just two days before the July 1, 2012 deadline, Congress passed an extension of the 3.4 percent rate for another year. The temporary fix was adopted as part of a transportation spending bill that passed the House by a vote of 373 to 52 and the Senate 74 to 19. The $6 billion price tag associated with the extension was paid for by limiting students’ eligibility to subsidized loans to six years and changes in pension laws. A year has gone by, and now legislators are back at square one.

• Committee meetings are now being tracked again. You can add a committee meeting tracker to your feeds and get email updates from the start page. If you were tracking committee meetings previously, we’re very sorry that you hadn’t been getting any updates about meetings. We’re now tracking House meetings even better than ever thanks to the House’s hugely improved transparency practices.
• Summaries from Congress’s Congressional Research Service were also missing. After restoring this, you’ll find 3,071 more bill summaries than we had before.
• Around the same time our loading of state bill information also stopped working. We recently restored it and you can get back to tracking bills in all 50 states (+DC) now.

We also corrected a major mistake:

You’ll also find some great new features:

• Votes on amendments now include more information on the amendment, where available, including the amendment’s sponsor and a short description (as provided by Congress). You can see this on the votes page.
• Every bill page now has a big “Share on Facebook” button. We hope you’ll use this to keep your network up to date about bills you care about.
• We also expanded our coverage of bills from 1951-1972 and bill text from 1973-1992 using the U.S. Statutes at Large. We were previously missing some bills since adding this data set earlier in the year.

We’re also playing with two experimental ideas:

• On some bill pages you’ll see a new Citations tab (example: H.R. 933). This tab lists the citations the bill makes to existing law, and we provide hyperlinks to where you can read that law if you want to try to put the bill in context. Citations to slip laws (i.e. “Public Law ___”) take you to a bill page on GovTrack (for laws enacted since 1951). Citations to the United States Code are grouped by title/part/chapter of the Code and link out to the Cornell Legal Information Institute.
• We also began offering you a deal: For $5 we’ll hide the advertisements on GovTrack (forever). If you find the ads annoying, or are conscious of your web privacy, you might find it worthwhile.

And some minor updates:

• We removed the ideology charts from pages for Members of Congress who have not yet sponsored many bills, since the results of the analysis were not very accurate.
• On the Your Lists page, the items in your lists are now links back to the pages where you found the tracker in the first place.
• Also on the Your Lists page, creating a new list had a bug. That bug is now fixed.
• And other minor changes.

For developers:

• Our API now includes committees and committee membership.
• The API documentation has been improved a bit.
• We re-wrote our developer page to provide a better overview of where to find the different ways to access GovTrack’s data.

• GovTrack staffer Gordon Hemsley is now working on adding bills from 1799-1873 into GovTrack. I can’t wait to see what those were about!
• Our communications staffer Avi Eilam has been manning our Twitter feed. Follow us to get micro-summaries of select bills as they are introduced!

And I’m going on vacation in June. Let’s hope there are no transparency crises while I’m away!

At the conference on Wednesday in the U.S. Capitol, staff in the office of the House Clerk, the Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office, and other offices, updated attendees on the status of ongoing transparency projects, from the new Docs.House.Gov to the new Beta.Congress.Gov. We learned that the House is developing new software to record committee votes — currently notoriously difficult to find — so that these voting records can be published in a consistent, standard, and machine-readable format on Docs.House.Gov.

The House Administration committee invited members of the public to speak in the afternoon. I closed out the conference with a presentation on an Open Government Data Maturity Model. (There was no need for me to present GovTrack — everyone at the conference already knows GovTrack well!)

Also on Wednesday the House Administration Committee published a press release rebuking a recommendation from a report that they commissioned that suggested it was OK to charge the public for access to the law. The committee wrote:

Today, House Administration Chairman … issued the following statement … rejecting a recent recommendation by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to charge the public for access to GPO’s congressional documents: … Charging the public to access important legislative documents offered online by GPO, like the Congressional Record and the U.S. Code, would be a direct assault on our ability to engage Americans in a process that is of great consequence to their livelihoods.

When the congressionally-funded report was first published I was appalled that it suggested pay-for-access was OK, and I am relieved that the House Administration Committee feels the same way.

Daniel Schuman at the Sunlight Foundation covered this in more detail, and James Jacobs for FreeGovInfo covered this originally here and here.

There have been some other great developments in the House earlier this year, including an earlier meeting on transparency, and new digitization projects for historical legal documents. And this continues a line of improvements to transparency during the 112th Congress (2011-2012), which I wrote about here.

Some Members take advantage of the feeds our site offers, and embed them as a widget on their webpage. Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Marcia Fudge (D-OH), for example, display their voting record using GovTrack’s feed of role call votes.

Many representatives provide links to GovTrack for bills they have introduced or cosponsored. Thus, Rep. Janice Hahn (D-CA) and Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) have linked to GovTrack in their press releases, while Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) have linked to the site in online summaries of their legislative work.

However, what Members of Congress use GovTrack for more than anything else is our district maps. These zoomable maps, based on data from the U.S. Census and reflecting the most recent round of redistricting, are featured on more than 70 official websites of Members of Congress, such as Reps. Michael Capuano (D-MA) and Blake Farenthold (R-TX). The maps allow voters to verify that they belong to a particular lawmaker’s district and see what else the Congressional district includes at an unparalleled level of detail.

We tend to think of ordinary citizens as the primary target audience of GovTrack, whose goal is to enable them to find out and understand what their representatives are up to. But by using the site’s tools, Members of Congress are also helping us achieve this goal.

• We started writing original summaries of select bills. Read them all here.
• Vice presidents now have pages on GovTrack. Remember that they cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, like in this one. Tie-breaking votes now indicate which vice president was the one who cast the vote.
• You can now search bills by their slip law number, which looks like P.L. 111-64. And enacted bills now show their slip law number, such as on this page.
• Email updates are now on a new schedule: daily weekday updates are now going out around 8am ET (was previously 8pm), and weekly updates are now going out Saturday around 2pm ET (was previously Sundays at 8pm).
• House committee assignments are finally now listed on GovTrack (thanks to The New York Times for contributing the information).

Here are some other less-visible changes we made:

• We replaced the ‘dot diagram’ on vote pages with a seating chart diagram, like on this vote page. The seating chart diagram arranges Members of Congress according to our ideology score, and that can reveal interesting patterns about how Members of Congress are voting.
• In tracked events for bills, we’re no longer including a separate “referred to committee” event if the referral occurs on the same day as the bill’s introduction.
• We added some explanatory text when a bill is “providing for the consideration” of another bill and for so-called “original” bills and resolutions. The text appears on bill and vote pages.
• Our bill prognosis now includes committee assignments as factors, and we dropped factors that don’t meet new significance testing.
• On district map pages, there is now a link to download a KML file of the map (inside the embed link).
• We made some fixes for how the site appears on mobile devices.

• We released version 2 of our API. Version 1 is now deprecated.

Civic engagement in the legislative process requires not only that the public have access to legislation proposed in Congress, but also that they be able to understand it. However, bills can be extremely long and often consist primarily of cross-references to other paragraphs and sections, as well as current law. This means that you may need to open multiple documents to understand a single bill. Moreover, the purpose of many bills is not clearly spelled out, and historical or legislative background is only occasionally provided.

Thus, the unfortunate reality is that even Members of Congress and their staff sometimes don’t fully know what a bill contains. Witness the confusion surrounding the lengthy and complicated health care bill in 2009. And lawmakers are aware of this problem: Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) recently proposed a bill that would require every piece of congressional legislation to be written in a way that allows members to understand what it does.

Here at GovTrack we’ve gotten a fair amount of complaints about wordy, incomprehensible legislative language. So we’ve started doing our own research on certain bills, in an effort to provide simple and straightforward explanations of their content and purpose. These are bills that have gotten a lot of coverage in the press and social media, have many of our users tracking them, or have piqued our interest. Oftentimes, they have all three features.

Here’s a list of the bills we’ve summarized so far, ordered by the number of users tracking them:

1. H.J.Res. 15: A bill to repeal presidential term limits
2. S. 150, H.R. 437: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
3. H.R. 138, S. 33: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
4. H.R. 142, S. 35: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
5. H.R. 21: NRA Members’ Gun Safety Act of 2013
6. H.R. 141: Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2013
7. H.R. 193: Seed Availability and Competition Act of 2013
8. S. 22: Gun Show Background Check Act of 2013

• Using the Statutes at Large, the compilation of laws enacted by Congress, we’ve added enacted bills from 1951-1972 into GovTrack. For example, here’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 (H.R. 7151 in the 88th Congress). You can search and browse them on the advanced search page.
• We also added bills and resolutions from the 93-95th Congresses (1973-1978). Previously we only went back to the 96th Congress (1979-1980).
• To explain the new data, we added a new coverage table to the About page.
• When you share a bill or vote page on Facebook, it’ll now include a thumbnail image.
• We improved the account settings page. That’s the page when you click your email address at the top of the page, if you’re logged in.
• On pages for Members of Congress, there’s now a link to their page on the C-SPAN website, where you can see videos of their floor speeches. Try with Sen. Mary Landrieu. (Thanks to The New York Times for contributing the data.)
• Fixed bill search so you can search by bill number without having to type periods and spaces, like “hr1234.”
• You can now also track the changes we make to GovTrack on github.

GovTrack pioneered three large-scale (i.e. BigData) statistical analyses of legislative information. You can find the results of these analyses on different pages throughout the site, such as on the pages for Members of Congress and for bills. The new methodology page outlines how those analyses are performed, and where sensible it evaluates whether the analysis was successful.

The Ideology Analysis compares the sponsorship and cosponsorship patterns of Members of Congress to put them on a scale roughly from liberal to conservative. We first began publishing this “principal components analysis” in 2004, then calling it a political spectrum. Follow the link for charts, Python source code, and references.

The Leadership Analysis looks at who is cosponsoring whose bills to see who the legislative leaders are. It’s a little like if you scratch my back will I scratch yours? The analysis is based on Google PageRank, the algorithm Google uses to order search results. We first began publishing leadership scores in 2010. As far as we know, this analysis is unique to GovTrack. Follow the link for charts, Python source code, and references.

For the 113th Congress:

• We updated our roster of Members of Congress and maps.
• New bills and votes began showing up on GovTrack today.
• The House and Senate haven’t posted committee assignments yet for the new Congress. For the moment we’ll continue to display the committee assignments of the previous Congress.

For each bill (example: S. 3637), we compute a probability that the bill will be enacted and show the factors that help or hurt the bill’s chances of survival. In the 2009-2010 Congress, only 3% of bills were enacted. The prognosis has helped GovTrack users identify which of the 10,000+ bills to pay attention to — those with probabilities higher than 3% — and it has provided important new context to the legislative process.

Last weekend I came across an academic paper (Yano, Smith, and Wilkerson 2012) on exactly this subject (thanks to Rob Richards for pointing it out to me). The methodology in the paper is remarkably similar to what we do to compute bill prognosis, which is reassuring. Wilkerson, the third author, has been doing interesting research on the legislative process for many years.

The paper had a good idea which I hadn’t thought of: using when during the Congressional session a bill was introduced to help predict its outcome. They found that bills introduced in the first year of the two-year Congressional session are more likely to make it out of committee.

So I’m adding three new factors to GovTrack’s analysis: whether the bill was introduced in the first 90 days of the Congress, whether it was introduced in the first year, and whether it was introduced in the last 90 days of the Congress. You can now see that last one in the factors for S. 3637, for example.

I found that these factors have a complex relationship with a bill’s outcome:

• Bills introduced in the first 90 days are a little more likely to make it out of committee. This makes sense since they have more time to be deliberated than bills introduced later in the session.
• Bills introduced in the last 90 days are less likely to make it out of committee, which makes sense for the same reason. But of those that do, they are much more likely to be enacted.

In other words it helps to introduce bills early, but we should not discount the late-breaking bills at the end of a Congress. Some of those bills will get rushed through committee, and if they do it is probably because they are the result of successful negotiations that paved their way to final passage.