House Digital Service’s Post

This month, the House Digital Service, at the direction of the Committee on House Administration and in consultation with the Clerk of the House, launched a scheduling application to assist committees to deconflict scheduling of hearings and markups. Deconflict is a digital calendar tool created by the House Digital Service designed to help committees schedule hearings and markups with fewer member conflicts. It allows Staff Directors and Clerks to view current and draft events from other committees and see which of their committee members have potential conflicts.  HDS leverages event data stored in the Committee Repository (docs.house.gov) hosted by the House Clerk. Committee Staff Directors and Clerks can add their pending future events as “drafts” to the Committee Repository, and other majority committee staff can see those events as calendar holds, as well as which of their members would have a conflict. This allows committee members and staff to better plan their events and coordinate with other committees, and ideally reduces the number of hearings or markups individual members must attend at any given time. The current/initial version of this product is only accessible to majority committee staff, but a future version may be built that will be accessible to all House staff and the public. This version will show the conflict information only for noticed events.     Speaker McCarthy and Majority Leader Scalise sent a letter to the Committee on House Administration in December 2022 asking for a tool to be created. The idea originated with the bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which passed a recommendation to “create a common committee calendar portal so that committees can have visibility into other committee activities and potential committee member conflicts”.