Accountability and Oversight

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Accountability and Oversight, Appropriations, Continuity and Resiliency, Modernization, Rules, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for June 29, 2020

By DanielSchuman June 29, 2020 12 min read

THE TOP LINE Musical chairs. The House of Representatives will have new committee chairs in the 117th Congress, but how will they be chosen? That’s a difficult enough question that we dig into it below. NDAA. House Armed Services will markup the NDAA on Wednesday; on Monday, the Senate will resume consideration of the motion to […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Appropriations, Congressional Workplace Fairness and Inclusion, Ethics and Influence, Modernization, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for June 15, 2020

By DanielSchuman June 15, 2020 11 min read

THE TOP LINE The House schedule has changed again: June 25 and 26 are for police reform legislation; the week of June 29 is for health care and infrastructure (!!!!); and the last two weeks of July are for Appropriations and NDAA. Apropos approps: Oddly, the Senate will start approps mark-ups first, and some subcommittee bills will go directly […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Appropriations, Congressional Security, Continuity and Resiliency, Ethics and Influence, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for June 8, 2020

By DanielSchuman June 8, 2020 16 min read

THE TOP LINE Police reform takes center stage. Widespread outrage over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, combined with dozens of videos of police attacking non-violent demonstrators, the use of unidentified internal security forces to police DC streets, and more than 140 police attacks on the press have elevated public pressure on Congress to address systemic police misconduct. […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Announcements and Statements, Blog posts

The PLUM Act: Transparency for Political Appointees

By DanielSchuman June 7, 2020 4 min read

by Jason Briefel and Maggi Molina A president will appoint more than 4,000 individuals to serve in an administration, yet “there is no single source of data on political appointees serving in the executive branch that is publicly available, comprehensive, and timely,” according to the Government Accountability Office in a March 2019 report. Instead, these […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Continuity and Resiliency, Ethics and Influence, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for May 26, 2020

By DanielSchuman May 26, 2020 11 min read

THE TOP LINE The Senate is out for Memorial Day recess; the House will be in for votes tomorrow and Thursday. (Yes, today is Tuesday. Welcome back.) Speaker Pelosi triggered a 45-day emergency period for remote committee and floor deliberations on May 20th; we calculate the end-date as July 4th, unless it is extended. Members can opt to vote by […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Continuity and Resiliency, Ethics and Influence, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for May 18, 2020

By DanielSchuman May 18, 2020 16 min read

What a week. On Friday, the House adopted a remote voting resolution (H. Res. 965) that provides for proxy voting on the floor, remote committee hearings, and creates a pathway for remote voting on the floor and remote mark-ups in committees. In other words, the House can function for the foreseeable future despite the COVID-19 […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Appropriations, Continuity and Resiliency, Ethics and Influence, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for May 11, 2020

By DanielSchuman May 11, 2020 16 min read

Will the House come back this week? Will Congress turn on remote deliberations? Is it really 142 days from the end of the fiscal year? There are lots of good questions (et tu, Senate) that we address this week. If we’ve missed something, ask us on Wednesday at 5pm at this virtual panel discussion on Continuity of […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Appropriations, Congressional Security, Continuity and Resiliency, Ethics and Influence, First Branch Forecast, Blog posts

Forecast for May 5, 2020.

By DanielSchuman May 5, 2020 9 min read

You may have noticed that you didn’t receive this week’s First Branch Forecast on Monday. This newsletter takes a team to write, and with so much happening last week and over the weekend, I ran out of time to finalize it on Sunday. Here is an abbreviated version. COMING UP THIS WEEK Wednesday at 2 […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Congressional Workplace Fairness and Inclusion, Blog posts, Reports & Analysis

Pay Study Data: Relationship of Cost of Living Adjustments & Staff Longevity

By DanielSchuman April 30, 2020 2 min read

Last year the House released a valuable report on staff pay, benefits, and diversity. We took a look at the data to answer the question, are better pay and benefits really correlated with staff staying on board? The short answer is yes. We’ll be releasing a series of short articles focusing on different variables and […]

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Accountability and Oversight, Congressional Security, Advocacy

Capitol Police: Statement of Disbursements

By DanielSchuman April 29, 2020 2 min read

Following up on our extensive review of US Capitol Police, we compiled the USCP’s Statement of Disbursements (the ones we could find).  USCP is legally required to submit these statements to Congress, but they are not available online.  Here’s our letter to USCP asking for the last five years of statements:

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