Deconflict
Developed by: House Digital Service
Used by: House Majority Committee Staff
Public link: N/A
Deconflict is a tool designed to prevent conflicts between committee hearings and markups.
The need for a committee scheduling tool has been put in the spotlight in recent years through mediums such as the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and various media coverage. The newly developed Deconflict tool aims to ease scheduling and reduce the amount of times Members of the House need to be in multiple locations at once.
The Deconflict interface shows schedulers which majority and minority committee members have conflicts for each scheduled meeting, as well as other committees’ schedules in real time.
The Need for Deconflict
Members have long championed the need for the congressional schedule to be adjusted to make more efficient use of Members’ time. In 2019, then-freshman House Member and Member of the Modernization Committee Rep. William Timmons [R, SC] named scheduling as one of the two big things he thought Congress should improve on. Committee scheduling conflicts are frequently thought to divide Members’ attention in a way that is a detriment to their ability to perform their duties. Later in 2021, the issue of scheduling was mentioned again in testimony to the Modernization Committee given by John Richter, the Director of the Congress Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center:
The Modernization Committee addressed the concern about committee scheduling by approving Recommendation #59 calling for the development of an internal portal tracking Member obligations based on their committee assignments to reduce the number of double bookings and allow committees to schedule hearings when most of their Members were available.
“The calendar and schedule do not just make an already challenging job more difficult, they also hamper your ability to fully engage in the legislative process, identify common problems and solutions, and build the relationships that make legislating possible while learning about the challenges of your colleagues’ constituents.”
Development and Functionality
In December of 2022, Speaker Kevin McCarthy [R, CA] and Majority Leader Steve Scalise [R, LA] sent a letter to the House Administration Committee asking for a scheduling tool to be created to reduce conflicts and improve legislative efficiency. The House Clerk had previously sent out a Request for Information regarding potential solutions to the House’s scheduling problem. The result was the development of Deconflict by the House Digital Service at the direction of the Administration Committee and in consultation with the Office of the Clerk.
Deconflict utilizes data stored in the Committee Repository to display an up-to-date schedule of committee hearings and markups to majority committee staff. Staff are also able to input pending future events as drafts to place calendar holds on time slots and see which Members would be available at any given time. Schedulers can filter which committees’ events are shown by using the check boxes on the interface, sorting out or including committees related or unrelated to the account holder’s committee. The current version of Deconflict is an effective tool for visualizing the conflicts between committee schedules, and will empower committee staff to begin improving the calendar so members do not feel so hampered by their multiple commitments.
While the current version of Deconflict is only available for use by majority committee staff, future versions may be developed for use by all House staff and the general public. A public version of Deconflict would allow users to visualize the committee schedule as hearings and markups become publicly announced, though draft events and calendar holds input by committee schedulers would not be shown. Suggestions and feedback from preliminary users has been very positive and will be considered when further developing the tool to best suit committees’ needs.
