Mail service-full general ballot meetings of Congress, which have go routine in contempo decades, are commonly known every bit "lame-duck" sessions. The unflattering descriptor alludes to the senators and representatives who have lost reelection or whose terms are almost up just can yet help make laws for a few more than weeks.

Lame-duck sessions historically were used to wrap up pending concern, and more recently to cutting last-minute budget deals. But none in the virtually five decades for which information is bachelor has been as legislatively productive as the lame-duck session of the 116th Congress, which wrapped up on Jan. 3.

More four-in-ten bills that became law out of the 116th Congress (151 of 344, or 44%) were passed in the concluding ii months of its two-year term. That'due south the highest share of lame-duck legislation since at to the lowest degree the 93rd Congress of 1973-74, the first years of our analysis. Amid the bills enacted during the contempo lame-duck session was a $900 billion economic relief pecker that had been the subject of a congressional collision for months leading upwards to Election Day.

This post is the latest in a serial, starting in 2014, examining the productivity of Congress. Laws aren't widgets, of course, and legislative productivity can be measured in many different means – by counting the number of pages in the statute book, how many votes were taken, comparison bills introduced with bills enacted, and and so on.

We've chosen a fairly straightforward approach: how many laws (public laws in near cases, as opposed to private laws that utilise to single individuals) each Congress really enacted. We besides distinguish betwixt substantive and formalism laws. In full general, substantive laws are those that have some real-world bear upon, no affair how small – be it spending federal dollars, setting policy, adjusting the boundaries of a national park or merely correcting a typographical mistake in an earlier law.

Ceremonial laws are those intended primarily to accolade or recognize an private, group or cause – for example, naming or renaming postal service offices, courthouses and other federal facilities, authorizing commemorative coins or congressional gold medals, or authorizing outside groups to erect memorials on federal land. (In earlier years Congress also designated dozens of special days, weeks and months in honor of various causes, such as National Next Door Neighbor Day, Nicolaus Copernicus Week and National Arthritis Month. Yet, that practise was largely abased in the mid-1990s.)

As our source for laws enacted, we've relied on congress.gov, an online repository of legislative data and information maintained by the Library of Congress. Congress.gov goes back to the 93rd Congress (1973-74), so that's where our assay of lame-duck sessions starts. Our more detailed look at substantive vs. ceremonial laws begins with the 101st Congress (1989-ninety). For each Congress, we reviewed the text of each law passed to sort it into the appropriate category.

In most cases we refer to each Congress using the 2 calendar years that brand upwardly the majority of the time each Congress is in session, though a Congress formally ends in the subsequent odd-numbered twelvemonth (for example, the 115th Congress of 2017-18 concluded on January. 3, 2019).

More than three decades of congressional productivity

Despite its late burst of activity, the 116th was overall one of the least legislatively productive Congresses of the past five decades. Of the 24 Congresses we analyzed, but iv passed fewer laws than the 116th – three of them within the past decade.

The 116th Congress sent 353 bills to President Donald Trump's desk, co-ordinate to the Library of Congress' congress.gov site. Trump vetoed ten of them, and all but one of those vetoes was upheld or not challenged. (The exception was the National Defence Authorization Human activity for financial 2021.) He signed the last of the remaining bills from the 116th Congress into police on Jan. xiii.

Past our deliberately generous criteria, only about two-thirds of the laws enacted by the recently concluded Congress (68%) were "substantive" – pregnant they changed written law, spent money or established policy, no matter how small. Formalism laws – those that rename mail service offices and Veterans Affairs clinics, authorize commemorative coins and the similar – accounted for nearly a third (32%) of legislative output, the highest charge per unit since the 110th Congress of 2007-08. (Our assay considers only public laws, which are laws of general applicability. Individual laws, which bear on specific individuals or modest groups, typically are used to settle claims against the federal government or make an exception to agency policy in a particular example; their apply has declined markedly in the past few decades, with simply ane enacted since 2013.)

Share of 'substantive' laws passed by Congress has varied over time

Amongst the more than meaning legislation enacted by the 116th Congress were four major bills and several minor ones responding to the coronavirus pandemic; a major conservation and public-lands law; a free trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico that replaces NAFTA; and a measure out to reform the governance of Olympic sports so as to protect young athletes from abuse.

Of form, the 116th Congress did take its distractions – an impeachment, a pandemic, a contentious election and its even more contentious backwash. And much of the 116th's relatively low level of productivity may be due to conflicts betwixt the Autonomous-majority House and the Republican-run Senate (non to mention those betwixt Congress and Trump). In the 115th Congress of 2017-eighteen, past comparing, Republicans controlled both legislative chambers and passed 442 laws, 69% of them substantive.

Other factors that probable helped concur down the 116th Congress' output include the senatorial filibuster, which effectively means all merely the least controversial measures demand a sixty-vote supermajority to move frontwards. Another potential factor is the long-term trend of bills growing in length every bit they compress in number. The 84th Congress of 1955-56, for example, enacted more than 1,000 public laws, simply they averaged fewer than 2 pages apiece, according to the Brookings Institution'south Vital Statistics on Congress database. Past dissimilarity, the 442 laws enacted by the 115th Congress of 2017-xviii averaged nearly 18 pages each. (Vital Statistics doesn't all the same accept final figures for the 116th.)

Lame-duck sessions have become more frequent, more productive

Information technology's also go more common for Congress to pass mammoth "motorcoach" or "consolidated" bills that bundle multiple smaller and largely unrelated bills in one "must-laissez passer" packet. Last month, for instance, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Deed, 2021, which at nearly 5,600 pages in typhoon form was one of the longest pieces of U.Due south. legislation always passed. It contained dozens of measures that in years by would have stood solitary, amidst them 12 appropriations bills, a new coronavirus relief packet, a pipeline safety constabulary, the almanac intelligence authorization act, and a raft of water development projects. It also included bills on energy policy, intellectual property and shipping safety, foster youth and families, simplifying the procedure of applying for federal student aid, and much, much more – including 27 pages of "extensions and technical corrections" to other laws.

Lame-duck sessions, meanwhile, weren't especially common before the 2000s, and when they did occur, they typically accounted for about a fifth of a given Congress' legislative output. (The 1994 lame duck was held for just ane purpose: because a beak to approve and implement the Uruguay Round trade agreement, which led to the creation of the Earth Trade Organization.)

Since 2000, still, at that place's been a lame-duck session at the end of every Congress, and they've gradually accounted for more than and more of the legislature's output. The 2014-15 lame-duck session, which ran almost to the end of the 113th Congress' term, generated 38% of that Congress' entire corpus of laws – second merely to the late output of the just-concluded 116th.