Counting all the proposals to restructure the US Department of Transportation over the decades requires more fingers and toes than one policy analyst can offer. Combining regulatory agencies to integrate and improve safety across modes; combining grantmaking agencies to provide state and local entities a single point of entry for federal grants; finding efficiencies by combining research programs…

Regardless of merit, over the years each of these ideas has foundered on the same abiding shoals that is the United States Senate committee jurisdictions. Tellingly, the only major change that has occurred at USDOT—to move the Coast Guard out and into the Department of Homeland Security—also prompted a change in Senate committee jurisdictions and creation of the current Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. The ideas for restructuring USDOT have merit and are worth pursuing – but any such idea will be a lot easier to achieve if we start with a more rational Senate committee structure.

In the U.S. Senate today there are 24 committees, of which 16 are permanent standing committee, and of those, 12 are major “Class A” standing committees. While a few of these have mostly discrete and clear jurisdictional lines (e.g. Appropriations, and to some degree Finance and Judiciary), the majority have varying degrees of overlapping and intertwined jurisdictions.

Transportation policy in the Senate is divided across three committees. Per Senate Rule XXV, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has jurisdiction for “transportation” and “highway safety,” as well as canals, maritime navigation, “interstate commerce” and “regulation of interstate common carriers, including railroads, buses, trucks, vessels, pipelines, and civil aviation.” You’d be forgiven for thinking that covers all of USDOT activities but it doesn’t: the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) separately authorizes the “construction and maintenance of highways” as well as “public works, bridges, and dams” (which happens to account for the majority of spending out of the Highway Trust Fund); and the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has jurisdiction for “urban development and urban mass transit.”  As the table below makes clear, the jurisdictional lines can quickly become unclear.

A Non-Exhaustive Table of Jurisdiction for USDOT Programs and Activities*

*Some jurisdictional assignments may be subject to debate (ahem: Safe Streets and Roads for All)

Senate committee jurisdiction matters in many significant ways. Unlike the House of Representatives, where committees may receive “joint referrals,” in the Senate bills may only be considered and voted on by the one committee that the Senate parliamentarian determines has jurisdiction for the introduced measure. These legislative referrals, and the decision of how to act on each referred bill, are the currency of a committee, so ensuring that bills get referred to one’s committee is a non-minor focus for Senate staff. The committee role is perhaps even more significant in budget reconciliation measures, wherein directives are given to a specific set of committees, who must respond with proposed legislation within their jurisdiction; the “Byrd rule” prohibits reconciliation bill from including anything that is extraneous to that committee’s jurisdiction.

Just as importantly though, committee jurisdiction affects policy choices, whether intentionally or not, and establishes the negotiating space—e.g. the policy gives and takes that are potentially on the table for any given legislation. The Senate being the institution that it is, it will come as no surprise that Committee chairs tend to be highly respectful of and protective of the jurisdictional lines between committees. While the stepping-on of jurisdictional toes may occur regularly in small and medium ways behind the scenes, it is not easy to make explicit deals on legislation that crosses jurisdictions. This poses a challenge for any policy with multiple committees involved (which is any broad multi-sector legislative effort). Consider permitting reform: the fact that the issue crosses several committee jurisdictions has resulted in individual committees creating narrow permitting regimes for their jurisdictional agencies, often resulting in inconsistencies across agencies, while also stymying a more comprehensive approach. Allowing one committee to lead the introduction and mark-up of a bill that implicates another committee’s jurisdiction would effectively cede that jurisdiction because it would create a precedent for future referrals.

The somewhat arbitrary committee lines also constrain bipartisan negotiations on broad multi-agency issues. Imagine a potential deal that involved both policy wins and concessions for Democrats and Republicans in approximately equal measure. Now imagine that the significant policy wins for Democrats and concessions for Republicans were all in one committee’s jurisdiction and the significant policy wins for Republicans and concessions from Democrats were all in another committee’s jurisdiction. Both committees could mark up their own titles with the intent that the bills be married into a single bill on the Senate floor and with confidence that there would be strong bipartisan support for that final product. But the interim committee-specific bills would be highly partisan. So moving them forward would not only require trust in the process from the committee members of both committees but also would require half the committee members of each committee take a bad vote in committee.

For transportation negotiations, the fact that highway, transit, and rail funding are negotiated in separate committees constrains the ability for committees across those modes and leads to more negotiation instead within those modes (e.g. funding for Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) vs Freight Formula funds). It also can result in the creation of programs that are somewhat similar, with the main distinction that they are authorized by different committees. For instance, after passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the USDOT determined that the MEGA grants (authorized by Commerce), Rural Grants (authorized by EPW) and INFRA Grants (also authorized by EPW) were so similar that they could release a single notice of funding for all three programs.

Unfortunately, the administrative re-combination of similar activities at USDOT is the exception rather than the norm. Much more often, minor distinctions in authorizations from the different Senate committees results in inefficient and fragmented policy that makes coordination across the Department a significant challenge.  Siloed and uncoordinated policies have significant implications for non-federal actors as well, with public agencies at the state and local levels required to produce multiple overlapping plans and studies, and unable to easily combine funding from different agencies to support different aspects of a single multifaceted project.

The Senate has periodically created select committees and study groups to review practices, procedures, and committee structures and make recommendations. In 1976, the Stevenson Committee reviewed the jurisdiction of the 31 Senate committees and recommended consolidation to 15 but the resulting legislation passed in 1977 only removed 6 committees. The political hurdles of removing committees (and chairmanships) are obvious, so much so that when Senator Adlai Stevenson was later interviewed by the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress in 1993, he cautioned against recommending broad jurisdictional realignments based on lessons learned from the Stevenson Committee. However, the benefits of having a smaller number of committees deserve recognition, and they go far beyond the benefit for senator schedules and their ability to participate in committee work activity.

Today, there is one committee that has an all-of-government perspective and is able to regularly produce bipartisan deals, and that is the Committee on Appropriations. (I do recognize that the end of a six-week government shutdown is a strange time to salute the powers of the Appropriations Committee.) Certainly power of the purse is a major and non-replicable reason for Appropriations being such a powerful committee, but other aspects could be emulated.

Consolidating the authorizing functions into a smaller number of more powerful committees would mean each committee would more regularly originate and consider legislation, thereby increasing the power and relevance of that committee. This would expand their ability to make bipartisan deals and increase their sway with Senate party leadership to determine the shape and timing of legislation that gets floor consideration. These more powerful and comprehensive committees could also exert more influence over the executive branch agencies, whose responsiveness would not be divided across multiple committees, facilitating a greater degree of oversight. A broader more holistic approach to policy making would improve consistency across agencies but even more importantly it would make it easier to change federal agencies as needs change, resulting in a potentially nimbler approach to governing.

While most authorizing committees today have 18-20 members and 4-5 subcommittees, Appropriations has 28 members and 12 subcommittees. Using this model to consolidate the total number of authorizing committees, while maintaining a large number of subcommittees, would enable current committee chairs to maintain authority through subcommittee leadership roles, while significantly improving productivity and effectiveness of authorizing committees.

Reorganizing the USDOT is an important task that Congress should take up and consider, and many opportunities exist to improve outcomes. But Senate committee reorganization should be considered a necessary precondition that would enable broad creative ideas for reorganization to move forward.

(And since you asked, yes I’d be happy to share my own proposal for how I would narrow 16 standing and 3 select committees down to seven total committees.)

The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Eno Center for Transportation.