house committee assignment process

Congressional Rules, Leadership, and Committee Selection

Published on January 31, 2023

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Every two years, at the beginning of each Congress, the House of Representatives is responsible for adopting rules that govern the procedure and process of the chamber, while the Senate uses its traditional rules and procedures. The adoption of these rules is necessary for sessions of Congress to run as smoothly as possible. Standing rules also dictate how party leadership and committee membership are selected. This is a basic guide to rules and procedures in both chambers of Congress.

Rules and Procedures in the House

At the beginning of each Congress, the House of Representatives must vote on a new rules package to determine the rules that will govern the body for the next two years. Before these rules are adopted, the House operates based on general parliamentarian rules. The House usually adopts the rules of the previous Congress and makes amendments the body feels are necessary. The rules package lays out the guidelines for the daily procedure in the House, how the chamber passes legislation, and other rules of decorum.

The House Committee on Rules is among the oldest standing committees and is the mechanism by which the Speaker maintains control of the House Floor. The House Rules Committee has two types of jurisdiction–special orders and original jurisdiction. Special orders, or special rules, determine the rules of debates on a matter or measure on the Floor and are the bulk of the Committee’s work. Original jurisdiction refers to changes being made to the standing rules. The Rules Committee can create or change almost any rule as long as a majority of the House agrees.\

Reporting a special rule to the House Committee on Rules is a process that begins with the committee of jurisdiction requesting a hearing by the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee then holds a hearing in which Members of Congress from the committee of jurisdiction can make their case.

Rules and Procedures in the Senate

Unlike the House of Representatives, the Senate, as a continuing body, does not have to adopt or readopt its rules with each new Congress. A set of standing rules govern proceedings in the Senate in conjunction with a body of precedents created by rulings of presiding officers or by votes of the Senate, a variety of established and customary practices, and ad hoc arrangements the Senate makes. The standing rules guarantee rights to senators, however, these rights are sometimes foregone by senators in the interest of conducting business more quickly.

One rule that separates the Senate from the House is the use of cloture to end a filibuster. Senators can prolong voting on bills by debating at length or using other delaying tactics, but a cloture vote by 60 out of the 100 senators can end the debate and force a vote on the bill.

The Senate Committee on Rules and Administration is responsible for upholding the rules of the Senate floor, the administration of Senate buildings, the credentials and qualifications of senators, and the development and implementation of strategic plans to improve the operations of the Senate. The committee has jurisdiction over any matters relating to the rules and procedures of the Senate rules and regulations. Unlike its counterpart in the House, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee does not need to develop a rules package for each new Congress.

Selection of House and Senate Leadership

Leadership in the House is decided by internal party elections. These elections typically take place behind closed doors via secret ballot in November following the general election. Leadership elections also determine the chairs of the Democratic Caucus and the Republican Conference and the chairs of the two parties’ campaign committees. The parties also elect their nominees for Speaker of the House. The Speaker is elected by a simple majority in a vote put to the entire House of Representatives.

The Speaker is the most powerful member of leadership, followed by the majority leader, minority leader, majority and minority whips, and finally the assistant speaker

In the Senate, leadership consists of the president pro tempore, the majority and minority leaders, conference chairs, policy committee chairs, conference secretaries, and campaign committee chairs. These positions are elected or appointed by their separate parties.

The vice president of the United States serves as the president of the Senate, but the president pro tempore presides over the Senate in the absence of the vice president. The president pro tempore is traditionally, but not always, the most senior member of the majority party in the Senate who is elected to the role by the chamber. Responsibilities of the president pro tempore include appointing the director of the Congressional Budget Office with the Speaker of the House, making appointments to various national commissions and advisory boards, and receiving reports from certain government agencies.

The Democratic leader in the Senate serves as chair of the party conference, but the Senate Republicans divide those duties, electing one person to serve as conference chair and another to serve as leader.

Selection of Committees in the House and Senate

Both parties in both chambers use steering committees, also known as committees on committees, to determine leadership and membership of committees. The Republican Steering Committee and the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee are selected during meetings in November and December after an election. The steering committees then make recommendations to the Republican Conference and Democratic Caucus respectively on committee chairs, ranking minority members, and general committee assignments.

In the House, once the steering committees make recommendations to their parties, the relevant party caucus approves the recommendations of the selection committee. Then the House approves the recommendations of the caucuses, which are brought before the House as privileged resolutions.

Traditionally, though not exclusively, committee chairs have been selected by seniority, so that the longest-serving Members of the committee from the majority and minority parties become the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the committee. Members of the House are typically limited to service on two committees and four subcommittees, with exceptions for particular committees.

In the Senate, the committee assignment process is guided by Senate rules as well as party rules and practices. The Senate governs committee operations through its Standing Rules XXIV-XXVIII.

Senators are formally elected to standing committees by the entire membership of the Senate, but in practice, each party conference is largely responsible for determining which of its members will sit on each committee. Just as they do in the house, steering committees from both parties make recommendations on committee leadership and assignments. In both party conferences, the floor leader has the authority to make some committee assignments, which can provide the leader with a method of promoting party discipline through the granting or withholding of desired assignments. The number of seats a party holds in the Senate determines its share of seats on each committee.

Senate rules divide committees into three categories based on their importance: Class A, Class B, and Class C. Each senator may serve on no more than two Class A committees and one Class B committee, unless granted special permission. There are no limits to service on Class C committees.

In both chambers, the Republican party has term limits on committee leadership roles.

Links to Other Resources

• Congressional Research Service – ​ Commonly Used Motions and Requests in the House of Representatives
• Congressional Research Service – ​ House and Senate Rules of Procedure: A Comparison
• Congressional Research Service – House Standing Committee Chairs and Ranking Minority Members: Rules Governing Selection Procedures
• CNN – What to know about upcoming House leadership elections
• GovInfo – Congressional Calendars
• Office of the Historian of the United States House of Representatives – House Committees
• Roll Call – ​ House adopts rules package for 118th Congress
• United States Congress – ​Glossary of Legislative Terms
• United States House of Representatives – ​ A Guide to the Rules, Precedents, and Procedures of the House
• United States House of Representatives – ​ The Legislative Process
• Unites States Senate – Rules and Procedure
• United States Senate – ​When a New Congress Begins

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Pretend you’re in Congress and we’ll give you a committee assignment

Congratulations, you’ve been elected by the voters in your House district to represent them in the 118th Congress. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start making legislation. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

Well, not so fast. Joining a committee, where the bulk of legislation is drafted, is both a little bit art and a little bit science. Congressional committees serve as an opportunity for lawmakers to oversee some of the most pressing issues the country is facing and develop expertise in specific policy areas. And a prime committee assignment could alter the trajectory of a member of Congress, whether catapulting them into important legislative conversations or into the pop culture lexicon. (Oh, you’ve never seen a viral video from a Capitol Hill committee hearing? Of course you have.)

There are several steps to securing a committee assignment. First, your party’s steering committee — yes, that’s a committee to decide if you can join a committee — needs to recommend you for a specific assignment. Then, those recommendations are put to a vote by your party. After that, the two parties vote on those recommendations, and finally a resolution is introduced on the House floor to formalize the assignments.

So, let’s put you in the shoes of a lawmaker trying to decide where you might fit best. Answer these questions to see which committee would suit your interests, and then we’ll show you how the politicking begins.

Your region demographics

Question 1 of 6

Question 2 of 6, question 3 of 6.

Your interests and experience

Question 4 of 6

Select all that apply

Question 5 of 6

Networking in the House

Question 6 of 6

The art of politics

Other factors play into whether you’ll be assigned your preferred committee. To account for this, we’ll randomize how well known you are, how controversial you are and how well you work with others.

You are well-known .

You are controversial .

This is where more of the art, as opposed to the science, comes into play. Some factors that determine who gets which committee assignments happen far outside the halls of Congress. Whether you have a strong base of national supporters, are a political lightning rod or belong to the majority party can play a major role in who gets valued committee assignments. There are many other intangible factors in the process, including whether you’re a people person or a more solitary figure on the Hill.

You need to answer every question to see your result. You’re missing questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Illustrations by Jordan Awan. Design and development by Stephanie Hays and Irfan Uraizee. Copy editing by Mike Cirelli. Editing by Annah Aschbrenner and Kainaz Amaria. Design editing by Madison Walls.

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Congressional Careers, Committee Assignments, and Seniority Randomization in the U.S. House of Representatives *

Michael kellermann.

† Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University

Kenneth A. Shepsle

‡ George D. Markham Professor of Government, Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University

This paper estimates the effects of initial committee seniority on the career histories of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established by lottery. Randomization ensures that queue positions are uncorrelated in expectation with other legislator characteristics within these groups. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect of seniority on a variety of career outcomes. Lower ranked committee members are less likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on their initial committee, are more likely to transfer to other committees, and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the jurisdiction of their initial committee. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the seniority randomization has a net effect on reelection outcomes or non-committee bills passed.

In this paper we examine the effects of the committee seniority system in the U.S. House of Representatives on the career histories of individual legislators. The committee assignment process used by the Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives provides us with a rare opportunity to sort out the consequences of seniority for the behavior of individuals while avoiding confounding effects due to chronological age, experience or other characteristics. When members are first assigned to committees , seniority ranks are determined by lot within groups of representatives that have equivalent chamber seniority. The randomization process ensures that, in expectation, seniority is uncorrelated with pre-treatment characteristics of committee members. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal impact of differences in seniority on a variety of career history outcomes.

Seniority and Legislative Careers

The seniority system in the U.S. House of Representatives is a collection of formal and informal rules and norms according to which long-serving members possess more procedural privileges and control more resources than do their junior colleagues. Two key practices constitute the foundation of the seniority system for House committees ( Goodwin, 1959 ; Polsby, Gallagher and Rundquist, 1969 ). First, once a member is appointed to a committee, that member is transferred to another committee only with his or her consent. 1 Second, the majority-party member with the longest service on a committee is presumed to have the first claim on the chair of that committee. These and other seniority-based practices are operationalized in the House by assigning ranks to each member of the party caucus on a particular committee at the time of initial assignment to the committee. Members move up the committee queue as more senior members leave the committee due to transfer, electoral defeat, retirement, or death. Thus, seniority is committee-specific; the seniority system consists of a set of parallel queues in which members advance at different speeds.

Most existing empirical studies of the congressional seniority system use seniority as an indicator of the relative power of party leaders and rank-and-file legislators within the institution ( Polsby, 1968 ; Crook and Hibbing, 1985 ; Cox and McCubbins, 1991 ), or examine the representativeness of committee leadership cadres produced by the seniority system ( Hinckley, 1969 ). Fewer studies consider the effects of the seniority system from the perspective of individual legislators embedded within it.

For legislators, positions on congressional committees represent assets that they can use to advance their electoral and policy objectives. All else equal, holding a higher position in a seniority queue is at least as valuable as a lower position. If seniority norms are followed, all members expect a higher-ranked member to become chair before a lower-ranked member. Likewise, since the Subcommittee Bill of Rights, the higher-ranked member will be advantaged in bidding for subcommittee chairs. The discounted present value of a given queue position depends in part on the political fortunes of the legislator, the fortunes of those above her in the queue, the status of her party in the legislative chamber, and the possibility that the seniority system itself will change in a manner that affects the value of her queue position. She takes the expected value of her committee ranks into account when making decisions about her political career: whether to transfer to another committee, to seek higher office, or to ride off into the sunset (possibly with a detour to K Street).

Given a disadvantageous queue position, legislators have a number of potential responses. One possibility is to transfer to a different committee. 2 If the value of a committee assignment depends on a member’s place in the seniority queue, then members holding lower queue positions are more likely to transfer. It is not clear a priori when during a legislator’s career we would expect to see strong seniority effects on the probability of transfer. On the one hand, representatives who “lose the lottery” (i.e., who are randomized into inferior queue positions within their committee cohort) might respond quickly to their ex post position in a committee queue in order to start accumulating seniority on a different committee. On the other hand, almost every legislator involved in a randomization is located far down the seniority queue; most are freshmen. In that position, members face considerable uncertainty about the career prospects of those ahead of them in the queue. They might wait before transferring in the hope that this uncertainty will resolve in their favor.

Member career calculations could, as a second possibility, induce them to respond to a disadvantageous queue position by leaving Congress. As a general matter, low queue positions should not affect the electoral prospects of an incumbent legislator. After all, voters cannot reverse the effects of the randomization by defeating an incumbent. Electing a challenger implies that the district’s next representative will rank lower on the same committee or will be on a different committee altogether. Indeed, one of the main effects of a legislative seniority system is to advantage all incumbents relative to their challengers ( McKelvey and Riezman, 1992 ; Holcombe, 1989 ). Any effect of differences in seniority should therefore operate through the career decisions of legislators rather than the electoral judgments of constituents. To the extent that losing the seniority lottery makes a committee assignment marginally less valuable, losers may find other outside opportunities, such as statewide office, relatively more attractive. 3

The assignment process

Our research strategy takes advantage of the process by which the Democratic Caucus assigns seniority ranks to newly appointed committee members. For our purposes, it is useful to divide the assignment process into two parts: committee assignment and seniority assignment. The process of assigning new and returning representatives to committees involves strategic behavior on the part of both members and the Democratic party body responsible for committee assignments ( Shepsle, 1978 ; Frisch and Kelly, 2006 ). As a result, the process of committee assignment is non-random; it depends on a variety of observable and non-observable characteristics of individual legislators.

The Democratic Committee on Committees 4 determines seniority ranks only after it assigns members to committees. 5 Members returning to the committee retain their position in the queue, moving up to a higher rank if members above them do not return to the committee. Below the returning members are, in priority sequence, newly appointed members who used to serve on the same committee, followed by non-freshmen representatives who transfer on to the committee for the first time during their current tenure in the House, then freshmen representatives who served in the House (but not the committee) in some earlier period, and finally any freshmen with no prior service in the House.

After these priority rules are applied, ties often remain between representatives within these categories (especially the last). The Democratic Committee on Committees breaks these ties through a randomization process, literally drawing names out of a box. 6 We call these groups of representatives with equivalent records randomization groups . Representatives retain the ordering established by this randomization throughout their service on the committee.

The randomization procedure used to break ties is key to our empirical strategy. Each time the Democratic Committee on Committees randomizes the rankings within a group of representatives, it in effect conducts a natural experiment. This ensures that in expectation any pre-existing attributes of representatives that could influence later career trajectories – their political experience or skill, the competitiveness of their districts, the influence of their state delegation within the caucus – are uncorrelated with the rank that they receive within the randomization group. Existing studies have not exploited this aspect of the assignment process, which allows for more reliable causal inferences about the effects (or absence thereof) of the seniority system on member careers.

Data and Models

Our research strategy requires us to identify groups of two or more Democratic representatives with equal seniority assigned to a single committee at the same time. We use data on committee assignments from the 80th to 108th Congress. 7 We identify groups of legislators who (1) received new assignments to a committee on the same date, (2) had equivalent chamber seniority, and (3) were assigned consecutive seniority ranks on their new committees. In the interest of making the observations used to estimate the effects of seniority on congressional careers more homogenous, we exclude assignments to select committees or standing committees subject to term limitations. We also remove randomization groups from the three exclusive committees (Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means) as well as those groups composed of non-freshmen. 8 This leaves freshmen randomization groups from the major and minor legislative committees.

After imposing these restrictions, we have 1348 observations in 308 freshman randomization groups, summarized in Table 1 . Each committee assignment that falls in a randomization group constitutes an observation; members randomized on two or more committees appear in the dataset more than once. Both the number of congresses in which randomization takes place and the total number of freshmen assigned varies dramatically across committees. In the data, there are no committees for which freshman randomization took place in all 29 congresses; Banking, Interior, and Science came closest with 24 each (see second row of Table 1 ). In nearly all cases, freshmen committee members received ranks far from the top of the committee queue; more than 97% ranked tenth or lower at the time of their initial assignment.

Distribution of randomization groups and career outcomes across committees

Each randomization group constitutes a small experiment on the effects of differences in seniority on career outcomes. The process that generates those outcomes is quite noisy, so we aggregate across these experiments and model the outcomes as a function of the queue position assigned by lot. Randomization groups differ in size (ranging from 2 to 15 members) and in the number of returning members occupying positions above them in the queue. To address this heterogeneity, we rescale the assigned seniority ranks within each randomization group by subtracting the median rank in the group. 9 This ensures that both the median and mean rescaled rank within each randomization group is zero. Some normalization is necessary because the nominal ranks assigned to the freshmen in a randomization group are correlated with contextual factors that could introduce bias. 10

To check the effectiveness of the randomization in achieving balance, we estimated a model with rescaled ranks as the outcome and pre-assignment covariates as predictors. As expected, these covariates (including age, margin of victory, delegation size, and prior political experience) do not predict rescaled ranks individually or as a group. 11

To estimate the effect of differences in seniority, we use generalized linear models appropriate to the nature of the outcome of interest. 12 Randomization balances the pre-assignment characteristics in expectation, so we do not control for these characteristics in the results reported here. 13 We do, however, assume linearity and additivity on the scale appropriate to each model when aggregating across randomization groups. While we would not necessarily expect the effect of seniority to be linear throughout the whole range of possible ranks, we believe that linearity is a reasonable assumption for the subset of ranks that freshmen actually receive. 14 Although linearity, additivity, and other modeling assumptions impose a fair amount of structure on the problem, the balance implied by randomization means that our estimates depend less on our modeling choices than they would in traditional observational settings ( Ho et al., 2007 ).

It is important to note that our inferences are conditional on the members actually assigned to each committee. Members receive committee assignments on the basis of a variety of characteristics. As a result, one cannot assume that the observed effects of seniority would be the same if the Committee on Committees randomly assigned members to committees.

This counterfactual is not particularly interesting, however, because the Democratic Caucus doubtless will never choose to make committee assignments without taking political considerations such as the expressed preferences of members into account. To the extent that the committee assignment process is essentially stationary over time (that is, the characteristics of freshman legislators assigned to particular committees remain consistent across congresses), we can use the available data to make inferences about the effects of seniority on the careers of those representatives who are assigned to particular committees.

Seniority and subcommittee chairs

We first estimate the effect of differences in initial seniority on the probability that a newly assigned committee member serves as a subcommittee chair on that committee at some point in the legislator’s career. 15 This outcome is closely linked to the seniority system; before the reforms of the 1970s, senior members of the full committee held most subcommittee chairs, while the bidding system for subcommittee chairs implemented after the reforms gives senior committee members the first opportunity to fill open positions. We estimate the model using randomization groups from the 80 th –105th Congress, instead of the full sample extending to the 108th Congress, in order to have a dozen years of career history for those members still serving in Congress. 16

As expected, members randomized into more senior ranks on their committees are more likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on those committees. To characterize the magnitude of this effect, we calculate the expected probability (using simple logistic regression) of serving as a subcommittee chair for the most and least senior member of a five-member randomization group (in other words, members separated by four ranks). Based on the estimates generated by the model, the most senior member of the randomization group becomes a subcommittee chair with probability 0.324, while the least senior member becomes a subcommittee chair with probability of only 0.209; this difference of 0.115 is the seniority effect within a five-member randomization group. The first row of Figure 1 illustrates this effect along with a simulation-based 95% confidence interval for the difference in probability. 17 An effect of this magnitude implies that differences in initial seniority play an important role in determining which members in a randomization group attain leadership positions on the committee.

Point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for change in the expected probability of indicated event due to change from the least senior to the most senior member of a five-person randomization group. Estimates based on logistic regression results (available in the online appendix) and generated by simulation from the sampling distribution of the model parameters.

The estimated seniority effect on the probability of becoming a subcommittee chair captures both the (direct) mechanics of the seniority system and the (indirect) behavioral responses of those embedded within it. The time that members must serve on a committee before gaining a subcommittee chair allows for two indirect channels through which the randomization may affect the probability of becoming a subcommittee chair. Members faced with poor queue positions may transfer more frequently to other committees than those who do well in the lottery. They may also be less likely to remain in the House. Having confirmed that the total effect is substantively and statistically significant, we now examine these indirect mechanisms in more detail.

Seniority and transfers

We estimate the effect of seniority on the probability that members leave the committee to which they have been assigned, either to transfer to a different committee or to reduce their total number of committee assignments. We explore the probability and timing of transfers by defining both short- and long-term transfer outcomes. The first outcome measures transfers occurring through the organization of committees in the sophomore terms of Democratic representatives who were initially randomized to seniority ranks. Members who transfer during their first term or who do not return to their committees at the start of the second term are coded as 1, while all others are coded as 0. A second outcome of interest is whether legislators transferred off of their initial committee at any point during their congressional service. Again, this variable is coded 1 if a member left his or her committee of first assignment while remaining in the House. Members who remain on the committee until they leave the House due to death, defeat, or retirement are coded as zeros. 18 With this coding convention, career transfers are a superset of first-term transfers.

We do not find strong evidence of a seniority effect on transfer behavior in the short term. As shown in the second row of Figure 1 , plausible estimates of the seniority effect in a five-member group (as measured by a 95% confidence interval) range from a 0.03 increase in the probability of transfer for the most senior member to a 0.05 decrease in probability, relative to the least senior member of the group.

Turning to transfers over the course of a career (third row of Figure 1 ), we do find evidence that members lower in the queue are more likely to transfer off their initial committees. Returning to our example of a five-member randomization group, the probability that the lowest-ranked member transfers at some point during his or her career is approximately 0.437, while the probability for the highest-ranked member is only 0.370. This seniority effect of −0.067 is substantively smaller than the effect of seniority on the probability of serving as subcommittee chair (0.115), both because the implied difference in probability is smaller and because the baseline probability of transfers is higher. To put the magnitude of this effect in context, this difference (0.067) is comparable to the difference in the probability of transfer between members assigned to their first-choice committee and those assigned to committees that were not their first choice. 19

These results demonstrate that seniority influences the transfer behavior of Democratic members of Congress over the course of their careers. The absence of a statistically significant effect on transfers during the first year could arise in one of two ways. The transfer process may be too noisy to recover an effect after only one term. On the other hand, seniority may influence transfer behavior more strongly after legislators know more about their prospects on their current committees. We obtain suggestive evidence by examining the cumulative proportion of members who have transferred after a given period. To make such an analysis tractable, we divide the dataset based on whether the member was in the upper or lower half of his or her randomization group. 20 As seen in Figure 2 , the cumulative proportions of members who have transferred are essentially identical in the two groups through the organization of committees in the second term. This is consistent with our estimates for the effect of seniority on short-run transfer behavior. In the remainder of second and third terms, however, the proportion of members who have transferred in the less senior group increases much faster than the proportion in the more senior group. From the fourth term on, transfers become exceedingly rare and the curves are essentially parallel. This implies that the strongest effects of seniority on transfer behavior occur during the second and third terms, after some of the uncertainty about the prospects of higher-ranked members has been resolved.

Members in the more senior group (black) rank in the top half of their randomization groups, while members in the less senior group (gray) rank in the lower half.

Seniority and reelection

Having shown that the results of seniority lotteries affect the career paths of Democratic legislators within the House, we now estimate the effects of differences in seniority on the probability that members remain in the House. We first consider whether the randomization affects the probability that a member is elected to a second term in Congress. Representatives who serve a second term are coded as 1, while those who do not seek reelection or who are defeated at the polls are coded as 0. Figure 1 (fourth row) shows that there is little difference in the estimated probability of reelection to a second term; in a five-member group, the estimated difference between the most senior and least senior member is approximately −0.01 with a 95% confidence interval of (−0.05, 0.03). We also look at longer-term reelection outcomes ( Figure 1 , fifth row). In our dataset, the median length of continuous service is five terms. Using data from members elected to the 80 th –105th Congresses, we estimate the effects of differences in initial seniority on the probability that a member’s tenure exceeds the median. Again, the estimated effects are small – approximately −0.01 for our five-member randomization group – and statistically insignificant.

The large amount of data and the confidence that comes from randomization across pre-treatment characteristics enables us to demonstrate that seniority has essentially no effect on members’ reelection prospects. These results are consistent with theoretical views of seniority as a protection system for the generic incumbent and thus independent of the outcome of the seniority lottery. The results also suggest that differences in seniority do not affect member decisions to remain in the House.

Seniority and legislative production

Finally, we turn to the legislative production of Democratic members of Congress assigned to committees in randomization groups. Legislative output has many dimensions, all of which are difficult to quantify. We use a rough measure: the number of bills sponsored by a member of Congress that are approved by the House of Representatives during the legislator’s career. This data is available for the 80 th –106th Congresses from the Congressional Bills Project compiled by Adler and Wilkerson (2007) .

Modeling bill production requires a more complicated statistical approach. Bill counts have extra-Poisson variability, and the total number of bills is not observed for members who remained in office beyond the 106th Congress. 21 As a result, we use a censored negative binomial regression model ( Caudill and Mixon, 1995 ) that accounts for these characteristics of the data. As before, we estimate the model using randomization groups from the 80 th –105th Congresses, so that the data contains at least two terms of bill production for all censored observations. Based on the model, the average number of sponsored bills passed by the House is approximately 11.1 over the course of a member’s career. In a five-member randomization group, the most senior member expects have 11.6 bills passed by the House, while the least senior member expects to have 10.7 bills passed. As shown in Figure 3 , this expected difference of approximately .9 bills is not statistically significant at the .05 level.

Point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for change in the expected number of bills passed due to change from the least senior to the most senior member of a five-person randomization group. Estimates based on censored negative binomial regression results (available in the online appendix) and generated by simulation from the sampling distribution of the model parameters. N=1248.

To explore this difference further, we divide bills into those referred to the member’s initially assigned committee and those referred to other committees. Approximately 80% of bills reported by committees are sponsored by a committee member and such bills are much more likely to be approved by the whole House, which increases the likelihood of a seniority effect in this subset of bills. Again using the censored negative binomial model, we find an effect in committee-referred bills, but not in bills referred to other committees. The most senior member of a five-member group expects to have five bills referred to his or her initial committee and passed by the House, while the least senior member only expects to pass 3.6 bills through his or her initial committee. This difference is statistically distinguishable from zero at the .05 level, but is not estimated precisely, with plausible effect sizes ranging from zero to three additional bills. The estimated difference in the number of committee-referred bills passed by the House is larger than the difference in the total number passed by the House. This is reflected in the estimated negative (but non-significant) effect on non-committee-referred bills. These results suggest that lower productivity in bills referred to other committees may partially offset the increased productivity of more senior members on their initial committees, but this conclusion is tentative given the noise in the data.

Several factors contribute to greater legislative production by more senior committee members. The results discussed above demonstrate that more senior members are more likely to become subcommittee chairs and thus have legislative responsibilities that accompany those positions. Moreover, more senior members are less likely to change committees and shift their interests to other legislative areas. This result does not appear to be due to differences in time served, because initial differences in seniority do not affect total time in the House.

The natural experiment created by the practice of randomly assigning committee seniority within groups of freshmen representatives provides a unique opportunity to understand how the committee seniority system affects the careers of Democratic members of Congress. We have focused on Democratic freshman assignments to major and minor legislative committees, which provide the vast majority of cases where randomization took place, while showing (in the appendix) that our results are not sensitive to the inclusion of randomization groups from exclusive committees or consisting of non-freshmen. First, as we expect from the simple mechanics of the seniority system, freshmen who receive positions closer to the top of the queue are more likely to chair subcommittees on the committees to which they were initially assigned. Second, representatives randomized to more junior queue positions are more likely to transfer to a different committee. This appears to be a rational response to a lower present-value assessment of their committee position; they have less to lose by moving to a new committee. The effect of seniority differences on transfers appears to be the strongest in the second and third terms, when members have a better sense of their future prospects in their initial queue. Finally, we find that random assignment to a more senior position on a committee increases the productivity of a legislator on topics under that committee’s jurisdiction, as measured by the number of sponsored bills passed by the House. These results suggest that winning the seniority lottery provides incentives for members of Congress to focus their legislative activities on their initial committee assignments. On the other hand, differences in the seniority ranks assigned to freshmen do not appear to affect the length of time that members serve in the House, nor do these differences significantly affect their legislative success in areas outside of their initial committee jurisdictions.

1 Exceptions arise when a change in the composition of the chamber requires one of the parties to reduce the number of its partisans on a committee (which rarely occurs because party leaders typically negotiate a larger committee size to accommodate compositional changes in the full House) or when a committee is abolished.

2 Shepsle (1978) presents data on the congresses from 1958–74 showing that half of all freshmen seek transfers or the acquisition of additional assignments in their first non-freshman term . By the time members are in their fifth term or higher, 95% have sought to alter their freshman portfolio in some manner, some multiple times.

3 In contrast, representatives who are fairly close to the top of a seniority queue may be tempted to remain until those assigned to places higher in the queue have left the scene. Hall and van Houweling (1995) find some suggestive evidence: representatives who were second in their full committee queues in 1994 were more likely to run for reelection than other members, particularly when they were younger than the committee chair (after controlling for the main effect of age).

4 Prior to 1975, this was the Democratic membership of the House Ways and Means Committee; after that point, this role was assumed by the Steering Committee of the Democratic Caucus.

5 Some vacancies may remain unfilled. Others are filled provisionally (called waiver appointments ); these are filled only for the congress in question by granting a member a waiver to serve even if in nominal violation of Caucus rules governing committee service.

6 One of the authors interviewed a senior advisor to Speaker Pelosi who stated that he personally organized the randomizations by writing the names of newly assigned members on slips of paper, placing them in a box, and having a member of the Committee on Committees draw slips from the box to establish the ordering. E-mail correspondence with an advisor to Speaker Foley and Minority Leader Gephardt confirmed that similar procedures were used during their time in office.

7 This data comes from the committee assignment datasets collected by Garrison Nelson, Charles Stewart, and their collaborators.

8 Deletion of these observations removes less than 20% of the data and makes the remaining observations substantially more homogenous. Moreover, including them in the analysis does not affect the substantive conclusions presented in this article (details are available in the online appendix). We hesitate to extend our inferences to the exclusive committees or to non-freshmen randomization groups because these groups contribute so little information to the overall estimates.

9 For example, if a three-member randomization group was assigned ranks 19, 20, and 21 on a particular committee, we rescale their ranks to −1, 0, and 1. Negative ranks correspond to more senior queue positions.

10 For example, the number of Democrats on each committee increases in tandem with the number of Democrats in the House as a whole. As a result, freshmen members joining the committee receive lower nominal ranks in congresses with large Democratic caucuses.

11 Details are available in the online appendix.

12 All of the analyses presented in this paper were conducted using the R statistical computing environment. Replication code and data are available from the authors on request.

13 Including covariates can increase the precision with which the effects are estimated. We re-estimated the models reported here using a number of pre-assignment characteristics. The estimates produced by these models were neither substantively different nor more precise than the results reported here; they are available in the online appendix.

14 In other words, although we expect that the difference between ranking first and second is larger than the difference between second and third, it is unlikely that the effect of being ranked 14th vs. 15th is much different from 15th vs. 16th.

15 We identified members who served as subcommittee chairs using various editions of the Congressional Directory .

16 In 9 cases out of 1268, members retain their initial committee assignments but have not yet served as subcommittee chairs. We treat these as zeros for this analysis, but our results are not sensitive to other assumptions.

17 These estimates were generated using the Zelig package for R, which uses simulation to calculate point estimates and confidence intervals for quantities of interest that are not model parameters.

18 As with subcommittee chairs, we restrict the analysis of career transfer outcomes to randomization groups in the 80 th –105th Congresses. In 67 cases, members remained on their initial committees at the end of the 110th Congress. Transfers after the sixth term are quite rare, so we treat these cases as non-transfers.

19 Strictly speaking, the estimated difference in transfer probability associated with assignment to a legislator’s first-choice committee does not estimate a causal effect, because the Committee on Committees does not randomly assign members to receive their first-choice committees. Frisch and Kelly (2007) provides data on committee requests; details of the calculation are provided in the online appendix.

20 Dividing the data in this way ensures that each randomization group contributes equally to the two subsets, so that differences in transfer behavior are not due to the determinants of the size of the randomization group. This analysis excludes the 134 members ranked in the middle of randomization groups with odd numbers of freshmen.

21 Note that we do not attempt to control for the length of time that members serve in the House because this is determined after the assignment of seniority ranks. While the results of the previous section suggest that differences in seniority do not affect tenure in office, controlling for the length of time that members have to introduce bills after initial seniority ranks are determined makes a causal interpretation more difficult.

* Thanks to Adam Glynn, Dan Hopkins, Kevin Quinn, Ian Yohai, Nolan McCarty, Keith Krehbiel, and two anonymous referees for comments on previous versions of this paper. Shepsle acknowledges support from the National Institute of Aging (ROI AG 021181).

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Appropriations committees release second fy24 package.

WASHINGTON - Today, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees released the second package of final Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills. The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 will be considered in the House in the coming days. House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger released the following statement on the package:    “House Republicans made a commitment to strategically increase defense spending, make targeted cuts to overfunded non-defense programs, and pull back wasteful spending from previous years. I am proud to say that we have delivered on that promise, and this bill is proof.   “Given that the world is becoming more dangerous, we wanted to send a strong message that we will do everything in our power to protect the American people and defend our interests. This bill funds our highest national security priorities - it invests in a more modern, innovative, and ready fighting force, continues our strong support for our great ally Israel, and provides key border enforcement resources. At the same time, we made cuts to programs that have nothing to do with our national security and pulled back billions from the Administration.   “With the odds stacked against us, House Republicans have refocused spending on America's interests, at home and abroad, and I urge support of this bill.” A summary of the package is available  here . Bill text is available  here . Joint explanatory statements for each division of the package are available below:

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• Division F - State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2024

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House passes a bill that could lead to a TikTok ban if Chinese owner refuses to sell

TikTok once again finds itself in a precarious position as lawmakers in Washington move forward with a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban on the platform. (AP Production: Marissa Duhaney)

Devotees of TikTok monitor voting at the Capitol in Washington, as the House passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app if its China-based owner doesn’t sell, Wednesday, March 13, 2024. Lawmakers contend the app’s owner, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

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Devotees of TikTok gather at the Capitol in Washington, as the House passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app if its China-based owner doesn’t sell, Wednesday, March 13, 2024. Lawmakers contend the app’s owner, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - A TikTok sign is displayed on their building in Culver City, Calif., March 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

FILE - The TikTok Inc. building is seen in Culver City, Calif., on March 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Devotees of TikTok cheer their support to passing motorists at the Capitol in Washington, before the House passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app if its China-based owner doesn’t sell, Wednesday, March 13, 2024. Lawmakers contend the app’s owner, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake, as lawmakers acted on concerns that the company’s current ownership structure is a national security threat .

The bill, passed by a vote of 352-65, now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear.

TikTok, which has more than 170 million American users , is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd.

The lawmakers contend that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government , which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. whenever it wants. The worry stems from a set of Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering.

“We have given TikTok a clear choice,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. “Separate from your parent company ByteDance, which is beholden to the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), and remain operational in the United States, or side with the CCP and face the consequences. The choice is TikTok’s.”

House passage of the bill is only the first step. The Senate would also need to pass the measure for it to become law, and lawmakers in that chamber indicated it would undergo a thorough review. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’ll have to consult with relevant committee chairs to determine the bill’s path.

AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports a bill that could lead to a TikTok ban in the U.S. has easily passed the House -- but its path forward is unclear.

President Joe Biden has said if Congress passes the measure, he will sign it .

The House vote is the latest example of increased tensions between China and the U.S. By targeting TikTok, lawmakers are tackling what they see as a grave threat to America’s national security — but also singling out a platform popular with millions of people, many of whom skew younger, just months before an election.

In a video posted on Wednesday evening, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that the company has invested to keep user data safe and the TikTok platform free from outside manipulation. If passed, he said the bill would give more power to a handful of other social companies.

“We will not stop fighting and advocating for you. We will continue to do all we can, including exercising our legal rights, to protect this amazing platform that we have built with you,” Chew said in his message to the app’s users.

In anticipation of the vote, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, accused Washington of resorting to political tools when U.S. businesses fail to compete. He said the effort would disrupt normal business operations and undermine investor confidence “and will eventually backfire on the U.S. itself.”

Overall, 197 Republican lawmakers voted for the measure and 15 against. On the Democratic side, 155 voted for the bill and 50 against.

Some Republican opponents of the bill said the U.S. should warn consumers if there are data privacy and propaganda concerns, but the final choice should be left with consumers.

“The answer to authoritarianism is not more authoritarianism,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “The answer to CCP-style propaganda is not CCP-style oppression. Let us slow down before we blunder down this very steep and slippery slope.”

“We have a national security obligation to prevent America’s most strategic adversary from being so involved in our lives.”

Democrats also warned of the impact a ban would have on users in the U.S., including entrepreneurs and business owners. One of the no votes came from Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee.

“One of the key differences between us and those adversaries is the fact that they shut down newspapers, broadcast stations, and social media platforms. We do not,” Himes said. “We trust our citizens to be worthy of their democracy. We do not trust our government to decide what information they may or may not see.”

The day before the House vote, top national security officials in the Biden administration held a closed-door briefing with lawmakers to discuss TikTok and the national security implications. Lawmakers are balancing those security concerns against a desire not to limit free speech online.

“What we’ve tried to do here is be very thoughtful and deliberate about the need to force a divestiture of TikTok without granting any authority to the executive branch to regulate content or go after any American company,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, the bill’s author, as he emerged from the briefing.

“Not a single thing that we heard in today’s classified briefing was unique to TikTok. It was things that happen on every single social media platform.”

TikTok has long denied that it could be used as a tool of the Chinese government. The company has said it has never shared U.S. user data with Chinese authorities and won’t do so if it is asked. To date, the U.S. government also has not provided evidence that shows TikTok shared such information with Chinese authorities.

Republican leaders moved quickly to bring up the bill after its introduction last week by Gallagher and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill. A House committee approved the legislation unanimously, on a 50-0 vote, even after their offices were inundated with calls from TikTok users demanding they drop the effort. Some offices even shut off their phones because of the onslaught. Supporters of the bill said the effort backfired.

“(It) provided members a preview of how the platform could be weaponized to inject disinformation into our system,” Gallagher said.

Lawmakers in both parties are anxious to confront China on a range of issues. The House formed a special committee to focus on China-related issues. And Schumer directed committee chairs to begin working with Republicans on a bipartisan China competition bill.

Schumer is likely to feel some pressure from within his own party to move on the TikTok legislation. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner announced after the House vote that he would work to “get this bill passed through the Senate and signed into law.”

In a joint statement with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the intelligence panel, Warner said that “we are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok — a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who chairs another panel with jurisdiction on the issue, said she would “try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”

Roughly 30 TikTok influencers and others who traveled with them spoke out against the bill on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. They chanted phrases like “Keep TikTok” ahead of the vote. They also held signs that read “TikTok changed my life for the better” and “TikTok helped me grow my business.”

Dan Salinger, a Sacramento, California-based TikTok creator in attendance, said he started creating content on the app during the COVID-19 pandemic purely out of boredom. But since then his account, which features videos about his life and his father, who suffers from dementia, has grown in popularity. Today, he has 2 million followers on the app.

“I’m actually appalled for many reasons,” Salinger said. “The speed with which they’re pushing this bill through does not give enough time for Americans to voice their concerns and opinions.”

Former President Donald Trump has spoken out against the House effort, but his vice president, Mike Pence, is urging Schumer to bring the House bill to a vote.

“There can be no doubt that this app is Chinese spyware and that a sale to a non-foreign adversary company is in the best interests of the American people,” Pence said in a letter to Schumer.

Associated Press staff writer Didi Tang contributed to this report.

SECRET SETTLEMENTS: Lawmakers hear allegations Davenport broke Iowa's open meetings law

O n Wednesday, the Iowa House's government oversight committee heard complaints about the City of Davenport paying almost $2 million across three settlements that were secretly approved in the last year. 

Witnesses who spoke during the hearing allege the city violated the state's open meetings law in the process.

"Something doesn't smell right here ladies and gentlemen," Mike Meloy a Bettendorf attorney representing one of the witnesses said. "Why is the city fighting so hard to keep these matters from the public eye?"

People who brought those complaints to the statehouse said the Davenport community has a right to know why and how their tax dollars are being spent.

One of those complainants said he's been investigating the deadly Davenport building collapse himself, and has requested and received tons of documents. 

Thursday the ten-month anniversary of the tragedy . 

However, he's now getting sued by the city for just requesting a document that would maybe give some insight into the $1.6 million settlement with the now-former city administrator. State Auditor Rob Sand has subpoenaed the same document and is being sued as well.   

"Again, I don't know because there are too many questions, but I know that the city had the responsibility for inspecting that building and I think the inspection, as I recall, the inspections in city hall fell under the responsibilities of the city administrator, who was one of the people that received the $1.6 million payout," State Rep. Gary Mohr (R- Bettendorf) said. "I don't know that there was a tie, just that it was all occurring at about the same time."

Rep. Mohr was the lawmaker who brought this issue to the committee and he also introduced a bill that would strengthen Iowa's open record and meeting laws this session. The measure has made it through the Iowa House but the Senate hasn't taken it up yet.

It's just one of the issues lawmakers are looking at in the aftermath of last year's Davenport building collapse .

"The most disturbing to me, that I realized, you said later the person who had authorized, they didn't have the authority, authorized the demolition of the building even though there was clearly someone still in it alive," State Rep. Bobby Kaufmann (R- Wilton) said. "Was the direct question ever asked, 'who the hell do you think you are?"

They're hoping to get some answers from the city but it might take some time and could be difficult now that there's pending litigation. 

Iowa's News Now did reach out to Davenport's current city administrator and city council but has not heard back. 

• Victor Mukhin

Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

Title : Active carbons as nanoporous materials for solving of environmental problems

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House Committees: Assignment Process

December 1, 2004 – February 25, 2008 98-367

Committee assignments often determine the character of a Member’s career. They are also important to the party leaders who organize the chamber and shape the composition of the committees. House rules identify some procedures for making committee assignments; Republican Conference and Democratic Caucus rules supplement these House rules and provide more specific criteria for committee assignments.

Information on the number of, and limitations on, assignments is provided in CRS Report 98-151, House Committees: Categories and Rules for Committee Assignments, by Judy Schneider. In general, pursuant to House rules, Representatives cannot serve on more than two standing committees. In addition, both parties identify exclusive committees and generally limit service on them; other panels are identified as nonexclusive or exempt committees. House and party rules restrict Members’ service on the Budget, Intelligence, and Standards of Official Conduct Committees to a limited number of terms.

Introduction

Committee sizes and ratios, factors in making assignments, party organizations, individual member rights.

Committee assignments often determine the character of a Member's career. They are also important to the party leaders who organize the chamber and shape the composition of the committees. House rules identify some procedures for making committee assignments; Republican Conference and Democratic Caucus rules supplement these House rules and provide more specific criteria for committee assignments.

Information on the number of, and limitations on, assignments is provided in CRS Report 98-151, House Committees: Categories and Rules for Committee Assignments , by [author name scrubbed]. In general, pursuant to House rules, Representatives cannot serve on more than two standing committees. In addition, both parties identify exclusive committees and generally limit service on them; other panels are identified as nonexclusive or exempt committees. House and party rules restrict Members' service on the Budget, Intelligence, and Standards of Official Conduct Committees to a limited number of terms.

Traditionally, the respective party leaders, occasionally with input from committee leaders, negotiate individual committee sizes and ratios prior to the post-general-election early organization meetings, when the assignment process officially begins. Sizes are determined prior to the start of the Congress, although they generally remain fairly constant year after year. When the size of a committee is increased, it is usually done to accommodate individual Member requests for service on a particular panel. In the 110 th Congress, the largest House committee has 75 members; the smallest has 10.

Ratios on committees generally reflect party strength in the chamber. However, it is generally agreed that ratios are done in the aggregate, rather than on a committee-by-committee basis, in part to retain a "working majority" on the more sought-after committees, often the exclusive panels. In contrast to the general practice, one committee, Standards of Official Conduct, has an equal number of majority and minority members, while the Rules Committee has a ratio of 2:1, plus one, in favor of the majority.

Both parties consider a variety of factors in making assignments, including seniority, experience, background, ideology, election margin, state delegation support, leadership support, as well as the special concerns of the Member's district. Further, the leadership often considers geographic balance in making assignments, with Members of the other party not usually counted for such purposes. None of these factors, however, is usually seen as having equal weight for each Member in each instance.

In addition, the rules of the party organizations and the House attempt to ensure an equitable number of assignments for each Member and an equitable distribution of assignments to important committees. However, the so-called "property norm" generally allows returning Members to retain their seats on committees prior to allowing new Members to seek their assignments. In addition, if sizes and ratios are dramatically changed, each party might make exceptions to the property norm.

Both Democrats and Republicans give the assignment function to a "steering committee." For both parties, the steering committee comprises the elected party leadership, numerous Members elected by region from the party membership, and Members appointed by the leadership. Representatives from specific classes—groups of Members elected in a specific year—are also represented.

Each party Member has a representative on his or her party's steering committee, and one role of this representative is to advance the individual Member's choices for assignments. The steering committee for each party votes by secret ballot to arrive at individual recommendations for assignments to standing committees and forwards those recommendations to the full party conference or caucus. (Even recommendations for the House Rules and House Administration Committees' members, which are made by the Speaker and minority leader, are confirmed by the full party conference.) Once ratified by the Republican Conference or Democratic Caucus, the recommendations are forwarded to the House, which votes on simple resolutions officially making the assignments.

Democratic Caucus rules guarantee each Democratic Member assignment to either an exclusive or nonexclusive committee. Further, if a Member's regional representative on the Democratic Steering Committee refuses to nominate the Member to the committee of his or her choice, the Member may ensure consideration by sending a letter, signed by half of his state delegation, to the chair of the Steering Committee. In addition, caucus rules provide for a separate vote by the entire caucus on particular Steering Committee recommendations if a vote is requested by 10 or more Members. Republican Conference rules do not contain similar provisions.

NKY's News Organization

Kentucky House committee nixes certificate of need bill

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Currently, both applicants and those opposing the application can sue.

“In short, HB 204 makes the certificate of need process just another licensing process.” Kentucky Hospital Association president Nancy Galvagni

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Home & House Stagers in Elektrostal'

Location (1).

• Use My Current Location

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Featured Reviews for Home & House Stagers in Elektrostal'

• Reach out to the pro(s) you want, then share your vision to get the ball rolling.
• Request and compare quotes, then hire the Home Stager that perfectly fits your project and budget limits.

A home stager is a professional who prepares a house for sale, aiming to attract more buyers and potentially secure a higher selling price. They achieve this through the following techniques:

• Rearranging furniture to optimize space and functionality.
• Decluttering to create a clean and spacious look.
• Making repairs to address visible issues.
• Enhancing aesthetics with artwork, accessories, and lighting.
• Introducing new furnishings to update the style.

Their goal is to present the house in the best light. Home stagers in Elektrostal' help buyers envision themselves living there, increasing the chances of a successful sale.

• Home Staging
• Decluttering
• Furniture Selection
• Space Planning
• Art Selection
• Accessory Selection

Benefits of the home staging in Elektrostal':

• Attractive and inviting: Staging creates a welcoming atmosphere for potential buyers.
• Faster sale: Homes sell more quickly, reducing time on the market.
• Higher sale price: Staging can lead to higher offers and appeal to a wider range of buyers.
• Showcasing best features: Strategic arrangement highlights positives and minimizes flaws.
• Stand out online: Staged homes capture attention in online listings.
• Emotional connection: Staging creates a positive impression that resonates with buyers.
• Easy visualization: Buyers can easily picture themselves living in a staged home.
• Competitive advantage: Staging sets your home apart from others on the market.
• Affordable investment: Cost-effective way to maximize selling potential and ROI.
• Professional expertise: Experienced stagers ensure optimal presentation for attracting buyers.

What does an Elektrostal' home stager do?

What should i consider before hiring an interior staging company, questions to ask potential real estate staging companies in elektrostal', moscow oblast, russia:, business services, connect with us.