60 percent of the bills Trump has signed into law have been one page long
By Philip Bump July 5 at 12:52 PM
With the annual August recess rapidly approaching for members of Congress — the House will be in session only 13 more days before its members take off for the month — pressure is on for President Trump’s party to show that it has achieved some significant policy goals.
Trump has repeatedly said that his stewardship has led to uncommon success, arguing last month that he’d accomplished more than any president since Franklin Roosevelt — a claim that hinges on including his many executive orders, though they didn’t always do very much. But it’s true that Congress has put more legislation on his desk so far in 2017 than it has in the first years of other recent presidents.
The question, though, is how significant that legislation actually is. How does the pre-recess work of the 115th Congress compare with other recent efforts?
One rough metric we can use to assess that is the page-count of each bill signed into law. It takes a lot less language to, say, name a courthouse after former senator (and “Law and Order” actor) Fred Thompson than it does to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Using the tools at GovTrack.us, we tallied the total number of pages passed by each Congress through the end of July of the first year it was in session. Since 1993 (the 103rd Congress), the current Congress has passed more pages of legislation than any of the others, save that of 2009-2010 — the first year under President Barack Obama.
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