Congress got a lot done this week

Even though you probably didn’t hear about it.

Good morning! It’s Friday, September 20, 2024. Election Day is 46 days away.

If it’s Friday, it’s time to shine a spotlight on what’s getting done in Washington.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that “Show Vote Summer” in Congress had turned into “Messaging Bill Fall.”

“It’s an election-season tradition in Congress” to advance bills with “no chance of being signed into law,” the Times said, pointing to the slew of “anti-woke bills” passed by the House this week and a pair of dueling IVF bills put forward by both parties and rejected by the Senate. (Not to mention the struggles in the House to pass a government funding package ahead of the end-of-month deadline.)

“With little more than six weeks left before the election,” the Times continued, “nobody in the Capitol is trying very hard to pretend that there is much left to do in Washington besides posture for voters with competing campaign messages.”

But that depends on where you look! Sure, if you only pay attention to the flashy, partisan, going-nowhere pieces of legislation, then that’s all you’ll see. But if you delve a little deeper — Congress actually passed a lot of legislation this week, much of it across party lines (and a good chunk of it poised to become law).

In today’s newsletter, I’ll fill you in on bipartisan bills that advanced in Congress this week to help kids in foster care. To help kids with cancer. To boost government transparency. To help veterans. To research Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome. To combat tuberculosis. And much, much more.

I checked — almost all of these bills received zero media coverage this week. But I’m covering them, because I happen to think it’s important to tell you what your government is actually getting done…not just what it isn’t.

If you agree, I hope you’ll support my work by becoming a paid subscriber:

And I hope you keep reading — because we have a lot to get to…

Two bills for kids

This week, lawmakers advanced two bipartisan bills that will help American children.

First up is the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act, which passed the House in a 405-10 vote. The bill reauthorizes the Title IV-B child welfare program, which is the federal government’s main program tasked with combatting child abuse/neglect and protecting children in the foster care system. In addition to re-upping Title IV-B for five more years, the measure would comprehensively update the program for the first time since 2008.

Included among those updates:

• Increasing the program’s funding by $75 million annually.

• New flexibility for states to give money to impoverished families facing an economic emergency.

• Expanded services for youth formerly in the foster care system until the age of 26, to support their transition out of foster care.

• More mental health services for children in foster care.

• Expanded funding for the 2.5 million grandparents and relatives raising children who would otherwise go into foster care.

• A first-of-its kind requirement for states to consult with children, parents, and foster and adoptive parents when crafting their child welfare policies.

• Increased training for caseworkers and a 15% reduction in their administrative burden.

• Streamlined access to child welfare funding for Native tribes.

The bill, which packages together 16 different proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, follows a year-long bipartisan review of the child welfare system by the House Ways and Means Committee. In a statement, Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) hailed the bill as a “rare example of how legislating in Congress ought to operate.”

The second bill is the Give Kids a Chance Act, which was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a 43-0 vote this week.

In recent years, combination therapy — combining two or more cancer drugs in order to boost the effectiveness of both — has become a cornerstone of cancer treatment. But since 2020, the FDA has approved 40 combinations of cancer drugs for adults — and only two for children.

This bill, authored by Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA), would offer children struggling with cancer access to these cutting-edge treatments by greenlighting cancer drug combinations in pediatric trials. (The FDA is currently only authorized to direct pediatric cancer trials of single drugs; under this bill, the agency would be authorized to direct companies to explore combinations in pediatric trials.) The advocacy group Kids v. Cancer describes the measure as “saving kids’ lives at zero cost to taxpayers.”

Sunlight is the best disinfectant

The House Oversight Committee isn’t exactly known as a fount of bipartisanship; usually, it’s the place lawmakers go to conduct partisan investigations of the other side. But this week, the panel’s chairman James Comer (R-KY) and ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced two pieces of legislation together, relating to drug policy and supply chains.

The committee also approved, by voice vote, the bipartisan Executive Branch Accountability and Transparency Act. Since a 1978 ethics bill, non-career executive branch employees have been required to file financial disclosure reports, publicly disclosing their sources of income, any gifts they receive, and stocks they own in order to clamp down on conflicts of interest.

But the disclosure reports aren’t exactly easy to find. “It takes a lot of legwork,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), told me, explaining the “massive fishing expedition” required to get these reports from government agencies.

“You have to track down the people in the relevant agency you’re trying to get the records from,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “You have to find who actually handles these things. You have to understand who [at the agency] is tasked [with] responding to FOIA requests… And that’s assuming that the people in these agencies actually respond to you at all, much less in a timely manner.”

Last year, POGO and several other good-government groups partnered on a database to make more than 30,000 of these financial disclosure documents public — an effort that Hedtler-Gaudette told me took “the better part of a year” to put together. The bill advanced in the House this week would require the federal government to publish a similar database itself, allowing Americans to easily access the disclosure reports for any executive branch official.

“What good is all this information if it’s hidden in a file cabinet and inaccessible to the public?” said Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY), who introduced the measure with Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI). “This is about making sure that things that are supposed to be public [on paper] are actually public in practice,” Hedtler-Gaudette told me.

I asked him, if the federal government is required to stand up such a database, will POGO view the months of work to create one themselves as a waste? “Absolutely not,” he said. “All of it has reinforced and brought us to this moment. So we’re happy to see it happening, even if it ends up in our database being obsolete.”

Congress can move quickly when it wants to

Back in July, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials told lawmakers that the agency was facing a nearly $3 billion shortfall this fiscal year (partially due to more veterans enrolling in VA health care after the bipartisan PACT Act). If Congress didn’t act by September 20, they said, millions of veterans wouldn’t get the benefits they’re owed.

Well, nothing gets Congress moving like a deadline (and the prospect of veterans not receiving health care).

The House and Senate, by voice vote, both passed a bill to plug the funding gap this week; President Biden is likely to sign the bill today. “Grateful to Congress for this critical funding, which will go directly to earned benefits for ~7 million Veterans and survivors,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough wrote on X. “We’re delivering more benefits to more of these heroes than ever before, and now, we can continue to do that without any interruption or delay.”

A real-life discharge petition!

Although Fridays are all about highlighting legislative productivity, it’s true, of course, that Congress could be getting more done and voting on more issues. A big reason they don’t, as I’ve written previously, is that congressional leaders generally have a stranglehold on the floor schedule; if they don’t deem it to be in their party’s interest to vote on a piece of legislation, a vote usually doesn’t happen, even if rank-and-file members from both parties back the bill.

One way around that, though, is a discharge petition, which allows members of the House to circumvent leadership and force a vote on a bill, as long as 218 of them — a majority — sign on.

The process is rarely used — but a bipartisan discharge petition reached exactly 218 signatures this week, which means the House will have to act on the bill within seven legislative days. The bill is the Social Security Fairness Act, which would eliminate provisions known as the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), which reduce Social Security benefits for people who also receive government pensions from time in public service.

I actually delved into the pros and cons of this proposal back in 2022, so I’d direct you there if you’re interested. Essentially, the bill will lead to more money for retired government workers like teachers, police officers, and firefighters — but it will also cost $195 billion at a time when Social Security is already running out of cash.

Anyways, the bill is thoroughly bipartisan: it was sponsored by Reps. Garret Graves (R-LA) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA); co-sponsored by 329 House members (more than three-quarters of the chamber); and the signatures on the discharge petition are scattered across party lines.

This is actually the second discharge petition to reach 218 signatures this Congress; the first was for a bipartisan disaster relief bill; House leaders ended up scheduling the bill for a vote before the discharge petition could ripen. Besides that, the rarely-invoked process has only been used two other times this century: in 2002 to force a House vote on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation and in 2015 on a bill reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank.

And a whole lot more

• I’ve repeatedly reported in the space on the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, a pair of bipartisan bills that would mark Congress’ first forays into protecting internet privacy since the dawn of social media. The Senate passed both bills in a 91-3 vote in July; the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced amended versions by voice vote this week.

• The House is set to vote today on the bipartisan Enhanced Presidential Security Act, which would require the Secret Service to give the same standards of security to presidents, vice presidents, and presidential and vice presidential candidate — meaning Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would qualify for the same level of security as Joe Biden, after the two assassination attempts targeting Trump.

• Speaking of Trump, remember when an IRS contractor leaked his tax returns (along with a slew of other wealthy Americans)? By voice vote, the House passed a bill that would increase the maximum prison term for such a leak from five years to 10 years, and the maximum fine from $5,000 to up to $250,000.

• The House approved bills (by voice vote) to extend funding for Down syndrome research, Alzheimer’s research, and rural emergency services, as well as a measure that would make it easier for children with complex medical conditions to receive care across state lines. The chamber voted 402-13 to extend funding for autism research and 408-7 to boost efforts to find missing foster youth. (The emergency services and foster youth bills have already passed the Senate, which means they will now go to the president’s desk.)

• By voice vote, the Senate approved a bipartisan bill to make the elimination of tuberculosis a foreign assistance priority for the U.S., increasing Washington’s efforts to fight the infectious disease. The Senate also unanimously passed the Southern Border Transparency Act, which woud increase the data that the government is required to release on migrant encounters at the border.

• The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a bipartisan bill requiring all new Amtrak trains to be equipped with baby changing stations.

• Bipartisan congressional leaders awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the Black female NASA mathematicians featured in the movie “Hidden Figures.” The House voted 308-87 to approve a Senate-passed bipartisan bill giving tennis legend Billie Jean King the same honor, which she will be the first female athlete to receive.