House Committees Get $350 Million Budget for Next Congress: Oversight and Judiciary Nab the Biggest Slices

This Congressional Resolution is basically the House of Representatives’ internal budget meeting, setting the operational spending limits for all its committees for the upcoming One Hundred Nineteenth Congress. Think of it as Congress handing out expense accounts to its departments. The bill defines the total two-year budget for each committee and then breaks it down into strict caps for the first year (starting January 2025) and the second year (starting January 2026).

The Committee Expense Report

Overall, this resolution authorizes roughly $350 million for committee expenses across the two-year period, covering everything from staff salaries and travel to investigations and report writing. The biggest budgets go to the committees with the heaviest workloads and most contentious issues: The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is capped at a total of $30,651,000, and the Committee on the Judiciary gets $30,250,000. On the other end, the Committee on Small Business is allocated the smallest budget at $8,100,000. These numbers matter because they directly impact how much staff a committee can hire and how aggressively they can pursue investigations or legislative goals. If a committee is trying to tackle a massive, complex issue—say, the Judiciary Committee investigating tech monopolies—their budget dictates the resources they have to do the job.

The House Administration Committee: The Budget Boss

While every committee gets its own budget, the Committee on House Administration becomes the central accountant and rule-maker. Section 4 establishes a strict, three-step payment process: a committee must authorize a payment voucher, the committee chair must sign it, and then the House Administration Committee must give final approval. More importantly, Section 5 gives the House Administration Committee the power to write the regulations governing how all this money is actually spent. This means one committee gets to set the administrative rules for all the others, which concentrates a lot of power over who can spend what, and how quickly.

The Emergency Fund for the Unexpected

Recognizing that things happen—like an unexpected crisis requiring a sudden investigation or hearing—Section 6 creates a $4,000,000 reserve fund for unanticipated expenses, split evenly at $2 million per year. This is essentially the committees’ emergency savings account. However, to access that reserve cash, a committee must first get a plan approved by the House Administration Committee. This is a functional safety net, but it also means that access to emergency funding is filtered through the central administrative committee, ensuring that no committee can unilaterally tap into the reserve fund without oversight.