Explore the links between the Federal Agencies and your congressional representative.
This project looks at the congressional committies that have oversight over the different branches of Federal government.
A key challenge facing Government Relations (GR) professionals is to determine who in Congress is the right person to talk to regarding issues that are important to the GR person. These could be related to the particular US Government agency that the GR person's firm does business with and/or specific legislation consideration that can affect the GR person's firm/interests.
This task of identifying the right audience has typically been the purview of lobbyists and other professional organizations. A GR professional working for a private business often relies on such lobbying assistance and pay a substantial sum in fees and retainers to engage the lobbyists.
This site is intended to assist the GR Professional to start identifying the key Senators and Representatives who have a disproportional influence on the business interests that the GR professional is supporting. The Senators and Representatives have this influence via their membership to the Congressional Committees that provide oversight to the Federal Agencies.
The site does not replace the important role that professional lobbyists play. The site seeks to provide an alternative mechanism and tools to the GR Professional to better educate themselves on the inter-relationships between the Legislative Branch and the Executive Branch of the US Government.
A Note on Methodology
The system of oversight of US Federal Agencies by Congressional Committees is not straightforward. There are committees that have very specific listing of agencies that they have jurisdiction over; while there are other committees that state their jurisdiction over specific functions or activities (rather than specific agencies) that may be performed by multiple agencies, leaving the analyst to wonder if the committee has jurisdiction over every agency that may perform any part of the stated function/activity (however small).
The data for linking the federal agency to the congressional committee was collected from several sources. The primary data source was FDsys databases that provide records of the congressional hearings. From this information, we culled out the names of the federal agencies whose officials provided testimony to the committee hearings. An important assumption was made: if the agency official testified at a hearing of a specific committee then the committee had jurisdiction over the agency. It is important to note that not all committees have the same level of influence on the federal agencies. Some committees such as Appropriations have a much greater level of influence than other committees.
The data collected from the committee hearings was complemented with information from the jurisdiction sections of the websites of the committees. Some level of judgment was involved here to link the committee to an agency based on the description on the committee website.