Campaign advertisements tell Americans a version of the job their members of Congress are doing on their behalf.
But it’s an incomplete report card, at best. A more complete picture of what lawmakers are doing in Washington, D.C., is possible — by digging into the data.
So, as the Southern California News Group has done in the past, here’s a more in-depth look at how legislators representing Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties performed in the 118th Congress, which ended Jan. 3.
Shrinking number of bills
By the most basic measure, it was a bad two years for getting anything done in the nation’s capital.
During that period, Congress saw the lowest number of bills passed into law in decades.
In terms of bills introduced and signed into law, the 118th Congress, which ran from Jan. 3, 2023 to Jan. 3, 2025, was the least productive session of Congress since at least 1974, according to data assembled by GovTrack.us, a nonpartisan website that tracks congressional data.
On average, historically, 793 bills are signed into law each two-year session, including those incorporated into other bills. In the 118th Congress, 614 bills were signed into law. Looking at standalone bills only, the 118th Congress signed 274 bills into law, well below the historical average of 513.
Historically, 5.81% of all bills introduced in a session are signed into law, including those incorporated into other bills. In the 118th session, only 3% of them were.
Legislators representing Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties were in line with the national average, seeing 31, or 3.4%, of the bills they introduced signed into law.
The shrinking number of bills passed by Congress is part of a trend, according to Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College.
“Instead of passing a lot of little bills, many times in recent congressional sessions, they’ve passed a smaller number of big bills, omnibus bills,” he said.
Part of the issue was that the 118th Congress — specifically the Republicans in control of the House of Representative — spent a large amount of time in leadership fights. It took a record 15 rounds of voting for Republicans to elect former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, as speaker. Ten months later, McCarthy became the first speaker to be ousted, leading to another 22 days of leadership battles before Republicans elected Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., as speaker.
Rep. Mark Takano, D-Riverside, who agreed with the “least productive label” for the 118th Congress, said he put a lot of the blame at the feet of the conservative Freedom Caucus, which both fought to oust McCarthy and then worked to scuttle bipartisan legislation late in the session.
“The American people got hurt by that,” Takano said.
During the time when the 118th Congress was legislating rather than wrestling with leadership issues, Los Angeles-area legislators fared a little better than the average legislator.
“We had some fairly senior members who knew what they were doing, like Adam Schiff and Judy Chu,” Pitney said.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., right, poses during a ceremonial swearing-in with Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., left, in the Rayburn Room at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025.
“I’m very, very proud of that,” said Kim, who was the highest ranking California member of the 118th Congress, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking analysis. She called legislation “one of the many pieces that makes a legislator an effective leader.”
Part of her success, she said, came from working with Democrats, including her membership in the Problem Solvers Caucus, which works to advance legislation from both Democrats and Republicans.(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., right, poses during a ceremonial swearing-in with Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., left, in the Rayburn Room at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025.
“I’m very, very proud of that,” said Kim, who was the highest ranking California member of the 118th Congress, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking analysis. She called legislation “one of the many pieces that makes a legislator an effective leader.”
Part of her success, she said, came from working with Democrats, including her membership in the Problem Solvers Caucus, which works to advance legislation from both Democrats and Republicans.(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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Focus on quality, not quantity?
But raw numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“It sort of depends on how you measure productivity or progress,” said Alan E. Wiseman, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Wiseman, along with Craig Volden, a University of Virginia professor of public policy and politics, is co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University.
The center awards members of Congress a legislative effectiveness score (LES). Lawmakers accumulate points for the quality and quantity of bills introduced, along with how far those bills get in the legislative process. There are more than a dozen ways to earn points, including the significance of policy proposals.
Republicans, who were in the majority in the 118th Congress, dominated the top of the scoreboard. The top score in the House belonged to Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., who accumulated 6.79 points, and the average GOP member earned an average LES of 1.44. Democrats, in contrast, had an average LES of 0.55. The average score for House members in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties was 1.12.
Democrats controlled the Senate during the 118th Congress. The top LES score belonged to Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who earned a score of 10.64. Democrats there averaged a 1.11 score and Republicans averaged 0.88. California’s senators had an average score of 1.16.
Locally, the highest ranking representatives in the House were all Republicans:
- Rep. Young Kim, R-Mission Viejo: 3.915
- Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona: 2.803
- Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Seal Beach: 2.526
- Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista: 2.442
- Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita: 1.869
“I’m very, very proud of that,” said Kim, who was also the highest ranking California member of the House, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking analysis. She called legislation “one of the many pieces that makes a legislator an effective leader.”
Part of her success, she said, came from working with Democrats, including her membership in the Problem Solvers Caucus, which works to advance legislation from both Democrats and Republicans.
Despite the perception of American voters as being at their most divided in decades, Kim said she hasn’t gotten real pushback about her bipartisan approach from her constituents.
“They clap and congratulate me and say ‘we need more of you,’ ” she said.
Despite not getting any bills passed during the 118th Congress, former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, was the highest scoring Southern California Democrat in the House, with a score of 1.518.
“Even though she didn’t have anything advance into law, she was successful in getting portions of her agenda advanced,” Wiseman said.
A large number of the items that Porter put forward made progress through the House, including H.R. 5658, which would have required vote-by-mail ballots to be trackable by the U.S. Postal Service using their existing barcoding procedure. Though the House approved the bill, it never got a vote in the Senate.
“The fact that she got things so far through the process distinguished her from other members of the House,” Wiseman said.
Legislators also get credit in their legislative effectiveness score when their ideas for bills get signed into law, even if their names aren’t on them by the time they cross the finish line.
The two professors who founded the Center for Effective Lawmaking use tools similar to plagiarism detection software to find language from failed bills that later shows up in bills that passed.
“That allowed us to account for people who were successful at working behind the scenes having the substantive portion of their bills get signed into law,” Wiseman said.
Sending funds home
Legislators’ impact can also be measured in dollars, specifically earmarks, or items inserted into bills that direct spending to their home districts.
The practice has been controversial in the past — it was banned from 2011 through 2021 — but it’s hard for legislators to say no to federal spending that benefits their local districts, according to Marcia Godwin, professor of public administration at the University of LaVerne.
“As long as (earmarks) exist, they’re going to take that funding,” she said.
Earmarks also tend to be popular with voters.
“I would gladly vote for any legislator, regardless of party or ideology, who fixed the 210 Freeway,” Pitney said.
According to data from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency, the average Los Angeles-area member of the House of Representatives requested $19.7 million in earmarks to benefit their home districts in the budget that covered the period from Oct. 1, 2023 through Sept. 30, 2024.
California’s senators, meanwhile, directed an average of $192 million back to the Golden State.
But not every Los Angeles-area legislator put in requests to spend federal funds on local needs.
“Katie Porter is the rare exception to that,” Godwin said. “She did not support earmarks and she went as far as repeating that while running for Senate.”
Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, who replaced Sen. Dianne Feinstein after her death in September 2023, also had no earmarks in the 2024 budget.
And not all of the requested earmarks made it back to California. The continuing resolution passed by the 119th Congress in March eliminated some funding that had been approved by the previous Congress.
In your feed
For some legislators in the social era, their biggest goal appears to be getting their message out.
Porter, who introduced 80 bills during the 118th Congress, none of which were signed into law, is a social media superstar, with 2.9 million followers combined on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter. That’s more than five times the average Los Angeles-area member of Congress, who had 597,393 followers across social media platforms as of the first week of April. California senators averaged 742,909 followers.
Porter’s not alone in making a big splash online, however:
- Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.: 5.2 million followers
- Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles: 2.3 million followers
- Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Los Angeles: 1.8 million followers
- Former Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.: 1.8 million followers
Focusing on promoting their political point of view, or their participation in congressional hearings, as Porter did with the whiteboard she wielded at Congressional hearings, is a valid strategy for legislators.
“There’s legislating and there’s oversight. And when you’re in the minority, oversight takes many forms,” Takano said. “Effectiveness is sometimes being able to concentrate public concern over something.”
But social media stardom itself shouldn’t be the end goal, according to Takano.
“One could argue that … former member Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene are very effective on social media, but the hot, volatile issues they focus on don’t result in any tangible impacts for people,” he said.
Harder to measure work
It’s not easy to quantify everything members of Congress do for their districts.
Legislators provide what’s called constituent services, where an elected official helps intervene in government bureaucracy on behalf of their constituents. This can range from writing letters of recommendation for a high schooler to attend West Point to helping a voter get the Social Security benefits they’re entitled to and more.
“I can think of lots of dedicated public servants who don’t get a lot of legislation passed but are focused on other issues,” Wiseman said.
It’s difficult to measure this work, although some voters find it valuable.
“It really is hard to measure, unless you do a survey of constituents,” Pitney said. “And even in any given year, only a small number of constituents interact with their member of Congress.”
Rep. Kim says her team puts a lot of emphasis on constituent services, including helping local residents with issues with the Internal Revenue Service or the Social Security Administration.
“My director of constituent services in our office works really hard for us,” Kim said.
Congress has an in-house database that tracks the work put into constituent services. Some legislators, like Kim, put information from the database on their official websites. Kim, for example, reported on her site that her office has returned more than $28 million to taxpayers from federal agencies, although no other details are offered.
Will 119th Congress accomplish more?
As for the current session of Congress, which began on Jan. 3 of this year, it’s too soon to tell how effective they’ll be, according to Pitney.
“I suspect a lot of smaller things will go forward, given that we have unified control of Congress,” he said.
That could be especially true of things aligned with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“If I was going to bet money, I’d say there was going to be a tax bill by the end of the year, but everything else is up in the air,” Godwin said. “You had a majority in all three branches in government, and very little got passed in 2017.”
Takano is skeptical the 119th Congress will be more productive than its predecessor.
“The themes from the 118th Congress are returning,” Takano said. Republicans “have a very difficult time governing, even when they have a trifecta” and control the House, Senate and White House.
Staff writer Linh Tat contributed to this story.
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