Searching for Bills Has Changed!
We're pleased to announce the launch of our newest feature - committee category searching. If you go to the Filter Bills section of the Query tab on any bill sheet, you'll see that there is a new drop down menu in place of the old committee filter:
You can now choose whether to filter your bills by a single committee (as you could before) or by using the new committee category.
What is a Committee Category?
We have looked at all the committees across the whole of the country and assigned them one of 11 broad categories:
- Justice
- Government Affairs
- Education
- Agriculture and Natural Resources
- Business and Industry
- Labor and Employment
- Military Affairs and Security
- Budget and Finance
- Health and Social Services
- Transportation and Infrastructure
- Housing and Urban Affairs
So, for example, the House Congressional Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Committee is in the Agriculture and Natural Resources category (which covers environmental, farming, mining and so on). The Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee in in the Government Affairs category (which includes anything to do with elections, interstate relations, local governance, administration and so on).
How Does the Search Work?
When you select one or more of the categories, and click save, it will filter the bills on the bill sheet to just bills that have been assigned to one of the committees in the category. This allows you to make sure your search isn't returning bills that are unconnected with the main topic of your search. So if you're searching for bills related to medical marijuana, you can select the Health and Social Services category which should help to filter out those bills related to the commercial aspects of marijuana legislation.
A few things to note:
- Not all bills are sent to a committee. So if you choose to use this filter, you won't find those bills.
- Bills can be sent to more than one committee, in which case they may be in more than one committee category.
How Many Committee Are There?
Lots! If you're interested in data (and let's face it, who isn't?) then the graph below shows the distribution of committees and bills (since 2011) across our categories. Unsurprisingly, Budget and Finance committees have the most bills. Government Affairs has the most committees, being a very broad category, followed by Business and Industry.
