Congress Classroom · student handout

What a hearing is for

Name Period

Committees of Congress hold hundreds of hearings a year. In the 118th Congress, House committees held 1,574, and only 91 were tied to a specific bill. Most hearings are about a subject, not a bill.

Words this lesson uses

Subcommittee. A smaller group inside a committee, responsible for part of its subjects.

Markup. The meeting where a committee goes through a measure and changes its text before deciding whether to send it on.

Ordered to be reported. The committee voted to send the measure to the full chamber. It has not left the committee yet.

Reported out of committee. The committee filed its report, which is what actually sends the measure to the full chamber. The vote to do it is not enough on its own.

Cosponsor. A legislator who asks to add their name in support. There is no limit, and cosponsoring is not a vote.

Public law. A bill that completed every step and was signed, or passed over a veto. It gets a number like 118-23: the Congress, then its order within it.

Committee record. The part of a measure's record listing what its committees did to it, including any hearing tied to it by name.

Four kinds of hearing

Legislative: about a bill, or about a problem a bill might fix.
Oversight: checking how the executive branch is carrying out the law.
Investigative: looking into something that went wrong, and who is responsible.
Confirmation (Senate only): questioning someone the President has nominated.

When a bill does get one

From 2013 to 2024, about one bill in 17 had a hearing listed on its record. Those bills got out of committee 41.1% of the time; bills with none, 7.2%.

Does the hearing cause that? Write your answer.

The EXPLORE Act (H.R. 6492)

Date	What the record says
Nov 29, 2023	Introduced in the House and sent to committee
Nov 30, 2023	Subcommittee hearing held, the next day
Jan 17, 2024	Committee markup; ordered to be reported
Apr 5, 2024	Reported by the committee
Apr 9, 2024	Passed the House
Dec 19, 2024	Passed the Senate
Jan 4, 2025	Became Public Law 118-234

Who was at the table?

Witness	Title	Organization
Katherine Andrews	Director, Office of Outdoor Recreation	Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism
Michael Reynolds	Director for Congressional and External Relations	National Park Service
Luis Benitez	Chief Impact Officer	Trust for Public Land
Sasha DiGiulian	Professional Rock Climber/CEO	Send Bars
Chris French	Deputy Chief of the National Forest System	U.S. Forest Service
Jessica Turner	President	Outdoor Recreation Roundtable

Sort each witness: federal government, state or local government, business, nonprofit, or other.
For each, write one sentence on why the committee might have wanted to hear from them.
Who is not at the table that you would have invited? Why?
Find one bill from your group's three on congress.gov. Open its actions and its committee record. Is a hearing listed? If not, does that mean nobody in Congress discussed it? How would you find out?

Exit ticket

A committee is already planning to approve a bill. Give one reason it is still worth holding a hearing on it.