Highlights from the New 118th Congress Interest & Legislative Effectiveness Scores
By Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman, Co-Directors, Center for Effective Lawmaking
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is pleased to announce the release of the Interest & Legislative Effectiveness Scores (ILES) in each of 21 different issue areas for the 118th Congress (2023-25). These categories are based on issue area codes from the Comparative Agendas Project with bill issue codings drawn from www.congress.gov. The methodology that we employed to construct these issue-based scores is the same as that for the overall LES. Specifically, we combine fifteen metrics capturing how many bills each member of Congress sponsors within the specific issue area, how far they move through the lawmaking process, and how substantial their policy proposals are. The scores are normalized to an average value of 1.0 in both the House and the Senate. More on our methodology can be found here. The distinguishing characteristic between the overall LES and the issue-specific ILES is that for the latter, we base our analysis on the subset of bills that each legislator sponsored in each issue area. We identify the top performing lawmakers in each area, by party, for both the House and the Senate in the 118th Congress.
To read the full report, go here.
To look up scores for specific members, go here.
