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bill_committees

Bill committee referrals

One row per committee or subcommittee a bill reached, as its BILLSTATUS document names it. referral_signal is set only for the six appropriations committees the money-bill classifier keys on; it is NULL elsewhere rather than absent. It names committees, not what they did: the committee activities BILLSTATUS lists under each committee (Referred To, Markup By, Reported By, with their dates) are not published, so find a committee's report in bill_actions. bill_committee_actions is a different source, the House committees' activity-report prints, filed at the end of each Congress, so it holds no rows for the sitting Congress. All columns are stored as VARCHAR.

Coverage. Sampled: bills the bill family has read from GovInfo BILLSTATUS, Congress by Congress from the 108th on; group by the Congress in bill_id to see which Congresses are filled. (measured 2026-09-28)

  • Parquet file: bill_committees.parquet
  • MCP query_sql support: Configured; requires an available artifact.
  • Publication status: Not established by this schema page or its measurement date.
  • Row count: Not stated here; the MCP describe_table reply gives the live count under publication.
Column Type Description
bill_id VARCHAR The bill this referral belongs to.
system_code VARCHAR The publisher's own committee identifier (hsap00); what a referral rule keys on.
name VARCHAR The committee's name as prose, which no rule reads.
chamber VARCHAR The chamber, which the publisher states for a committee and omits for a subcommittee.
committee_type VARCHAR The publisher's committee type (Standing, Select...); absent on a subcommittee.
parent_system_code VARCHAR The parent committee's system code when this row is a subcommittee.
is_subcommittee VARCHAR True when this row came from another committee's subcommittees list.
snapshot_update_date VARCHAR The parent document's updateDate, so a committee list is versioned with its bill.
referral_signal VARCHAR The money-bill referral signal this system code raises, from the six full-committee codes; NULL outside them, supplied by the caller that owns the vocabulary.
referral_rule VARCHAR The rule applied to produce referral_signal; a system-code lookup, never a name match.