Electing a Member to a certain standing committee of the House of Representatives.

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Bill ID: 119/hres/283
Last Updated: January 29, 2026

Sponsored by

Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1]

ID: C001103

Follow the money

The bill

Electing a Member to a certain standing committee of the House of Representatives.

HRES. 283, 119th Congress.

The sponsor

Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1]

Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.

The money

$71,565 raised

23 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.

The alignment

55% match to Project 2025

This bill's text tracks the "Department of Homeland Security" section, p. 205-207 of the Mandate for Leadership.

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

Track this bill's progress through the legislative process

Latest Action

Motion to reconsider laid on the table Agreed to without objection.

March 31, 2025

Introduced

📍 Current Status

Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.

🏛️

Committee Review

🗳️

Floor Action

✅

Passed House

🏛️

Senate Review

🎉

Passed Congress

🖊️

Presidential Action

⚖️

Became Law

📚 How does a bill become a law?

1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.

2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.

3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.

4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.

5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.

6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.

7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!

Bill Summary

Joy, another thrilling episode of "Congressional Theater" brought to you by the esteemed members of the House of Representatives. Let's dissect this masterpiece, shall we?

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** Ah, the main purpose? To elect a new member to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Wow, I can barely contain my excitement. It's not like they're trying to distract us from actual policy issues or anything. The objective is clear: to give Mr. McCormick a shiny new badge and a seat at the big kids' table.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** Oh boy, this is where it gets juicy. There are no changes to existing law. None. Zilch. This bill is as substantial as a participation trophy. It's a ceremonial resolution that says, "Hey, we're going to elect someone new to the committee!" Congratulations, Mr. McCormick! You've won the congressional equivalent of a prize for showing up.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The affected parties? Only the ego of Mr. McCormick and possibly his constituents who will be fooled into thinking this is an actual accomplishment. As for stakeholders, I'm sure the lobbyists and special interest groups are just thrilled to have another pawn in their game of influence peddling.

**Potential Impact & Implications:** The impact? Zero. Zilch. Nada. This bill is a placebo, a sugar pill designed to make voters feel like something is being done when, in reality, it's just business as usual. The implications? More of the same: empty promises, hollow gestures, and a continued erosion of trust in our esteemed institutions.

Diagnosis: This bill suffers from a severe case of "Legislative Laryngitis" – an inability to produce meaningful policy due to chronic cowardice and a desire for self-aggrandizement. The symptoms are clear: a lack of substance, a focus on optics over outcomes, and a healthy dose of bureaucratic doublespeak.

Treatment? A strong dose of reality, a splash of transparency, and a healthy serving of accountability. But let's be real, folks, this patient is terminal.

Related Topics

Congressional Rules & Procedures
Generated using Llama 3.1 70B (Dr. Haus personality)

💰 Campaign Finance Network

Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$71,565
20 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$2,500
Committees
$0
Individuals
$69,065

No PAC contributions found

1
SAVANNAH TOYOTA
2 transactions
$2,000
2
TYBEE MARKET
1 transaction
$500

No committee contributions found

1
SADOWSKI, GARY T.
2 transactions
$6,600
2
KIMBELL, JEFFREY
2 transactions
$6,600
3
SMITH, BYRON L.
1 transaction
$5,000
4
MUNOZ, DONALD
1 transaction
$4,665
5
RICKS, DAVID A.
1 transaction
$3,300
6
STEERE, WILLIAM C. JR.
1 transaction
$3,300
7
HENNESSY, MARK W.
1 transaction
$3,300
8
MCWANE, C. PHILLIP
1 transaction
$3,300
9
MILNER, STEPHEN DONALD
1 transaction
$3,300
10
BOERNER, CHRISTOPHER
1 transaction
$3,300
11
DAVIS, ROBERT M.
1 transaction
$3,300
12
GATES, WILLIAM H. III
1 transaction
$3,300
13
HEAD, KATHRYN
1 transaction
$3,300
14
MARTIN, JOHN
1 transaction
$3,300
15
O'DAY, DANIEL
1 transaction
$3,300
16
RABAH, TAREK
1 transaction
$3,300
17
HENNESSY, MARK W
1 transaction
$3,300
18
HENNESSY, PAULA B.
1 transaction
$3,300

Donor Network - Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1]

PACs
Organizations
Individuals
Politicians

Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.

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Showing 41 nodes and 23 connections (43 secondary connections hidden)

Total contributions: $71,565

Top Donors - Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1]

Showing top 20 donors by contribution amount

2 Orgs18 Individuals

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.

Department of Homeland Security

Weak
Vector: 57%
Pages: 205-207AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"The bill concerns a procedural House committee election, while the Project 2025 text focuses on staffing and directing the State Department with political appointees; both touch on foreign affairs personnel but the bill does not implement or directly support the policy objectives."

Key themes:foreign affairspersonnel appointmentsState Departmentpolitical appointees

— 173 — Department of State service and civil service personnel who share the President’s vision and policy agendas—to run the department. This can be done by taking these steps at the outset of the next Administration. Exert Leverage During the Confirmation Process. Notwithstanding the challenges and slowness of the modern U.S. Senate confirmation process, the next President can exert leverage on the Senate if he or she is willing to place State Department appointees directly into those roles, pending confirmation. Doing so would both ensure that the department has immediate senior political leadership and would force the Senate to act on nominees’ appointments instead of being allowed to engage in dilatory tactics that cripple the State Department’s function- ality for weeks, months, or even years. Assert Leadership in the Appointment Process. The next Administration should assert leadership over, and guidance to, the State Department by placing political appointees in positions that do not require Senate confirmation, including senior advisors, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and Deputy Assistant Sec- retaries. Given the department’s size, the next Administration should also increase the number of political appointees to manage it. To the extent possible, all non-confirmed senior appointees should be selected by the President-elect’s transition team or the new President’s Office of Presiden- tial Personnel (depending on the timing of selection) and be in place the first day of the Administration. No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day. These recommendations do not imply that foreign service and civil service officials should be excluded from key roles: It is hard to imagine a scenario in which they are not immediately relevant to the transition of power. The main suggestion here is that as many political appoin- tees as possible should be in place at the start of a new Administration. Support and Train Political Appointees. The Secretary of State should use his or her office and its resources to ensure regular coordination among all political appointees, which should take the form of strategy meetings, trainings, and other events. The secretary should also take reasonable steps to ensure that the State Department’s political appointees are connected to other departments’ political appointees, which is critical for cross-agency effectiveness and morale. The sec- retary should capitalize on the more experienced political appointees by using them as the foundation for a mentorship program for less experienced political appointees. The interaction of political appointees must be routine and operational rather than incidental or occasional, and it must be treated as a crucial dimension for the next Administration’s success. Maximize the Value of Career Officials. Career foreign service and civil service personnel can and must be leveraged for their expertise and commit- ment to the President’s mission. Indeed, the State Department has thousands of employees with unparalleled linguistic, cultural, policy, and administrative skills, — 174 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and large numbers of them have been an enormous resource to the Secretaries of State under which they have served. The secretary must find a way to make clear to career officials that despite prior history and modes of operation, they need not be adversaries of a conservative President, Secretary of State, or the team of political appointees. Reboot Ambassadors Worldwide. All ambassadors are required to submit letters of resignation at the start of a new Administration. Previous Republican Administrations have accepted the resignations of only the political ambassadors and allowed the foreign service ambassadors to retain their posts, sometimes for months or years into a new Administration.5 The next Administration must go further: It should both accept the resignations of all political ambassadors and quickly review and reassess all career ambassadors. This review should commence well before the new Administration’s first day. Ambassadors in countries where U.S. policy or posture would substantially change under the new Administration, as well as any who have evinced hostility toward the incoming Administration or its agenda, should be recalled immediately. The priority should be to put in place new ambassadors who support the Presi- dent’s agenda among political appointees, foreign service officers, and civil service personnel, with no predetermined percentage among these categories. Political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President should be pri- oritized for key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). RIGHTING THE SHIP Ensuring the State Department is accountable for serving American citi- zens first will require—at a minimum—that the following steps be implemented immediately: Review Retroactively. Before inauguration, the President-elect’s department transition team should assess every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments. Upon inauguration, the Secretary of State should order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc., pending a political appointee-driven review to ensure that such efforts comport with the new Administration’s policies. The quality of this review is more import- ant than speed. The posture of the department during this review should be an unwavering desire to prioritize the American people—including a recognition that the federal government must be a diligent steward of taxpayer dollars. Implement Repair. The State Department must change its handling of international agreements to restore constitutional governance. Under prior Administrations, unnecessary institutional factors in the department caused

Department of Homeland Security

Minimal
Vector: 58%
Pages: 168-170AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"The bill is a procedural House resolution concerning committee membership and does not address any DHS objectives such as border security, protection of officials, or personnel reforms outlined in Project 2025."

— 136 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Secure our coasts and economic zones; l Protect political leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government; and l Oversee transportation security. OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY (SEC) In the next Administration, the Office of the Secretary should take on the fol- lowing key issues and challenges to ensure the effective operation of DHS. Expansion of Dedicated Political Personnel. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed political appointee, but for budgetary reasons, he or she has historically been unable to fund a dedi- cated team of political appointees. A key first step for the Secretary to improve front-office functions is to have his or her own dedicated team of political appoin- tees selected and vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is not reliant on detailees from other parts of the department, to help ensure the completion of the next President’s agenda. An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions. While Senate confirmation is a constitutionally necessary requirement for appointing agency leadership, the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition. For example, the next Administration arguably should place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as “actings” (for example, putting in a person to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP while that person is going through the confirmation process to direct ICE or become the Secretary). This approach would both guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda and equip the department for potential emergency situations while still honoring the confirmation requirement. The department should also look to remove lower-level but nevertheless important positions that currently require Senate confirmation from the confirmation requirement, although this effort would require legislation (and might also be mooted in the event of legisla- tion that closes portions of the department that currently have Senate-confirmed leadership). Clearer, More Durable, and Political-Only Line of Succession. Based on previous experience, the department needs legislation to establish a more durable but politically oriented line of succession for agency decision-making purposes. The ideal sequence for line of succession is certainly debatable, except that in cir- cumstances where a career employee holds a leadership position in the department, that position should be deemed vacant for line-of-succession purposes and the next eligible political appointee in the sequence should assume acting authority. Further, — 137 — Department of Homeland Security individuals wielding acting Secretary authority should have explicit authority to finalize agency actions, including regulations, to ensure that the department’s homeland security mission is fulfilled. Soft Closure of Unnecessary Offices. Pending a possible presidential deci- sion to shrink or eliminate DHS itself, the next Administration will still have the obligation to protect the homeland as required by law. The Secretary therefore can and should use his or her inherent, discretionary leadership authority to “soft close” ineffective and problematic corners of the department. While those corners are to be determined, the Secretary could shift personnel, funding, and opera- tional responsibility to mission-essential components of the department, including the Office of the Secretary itself. This effort not only would make the department more efficient, but also would support a legislative move to shrink or dismantle the department by showing that the agency can fulfill national security–critical functions without its current bloated bureaucracy. Restructuring and Redistribution of Career Personnel. To strengthen political decision-making and ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used legally and efficiently, the Secretary should make major changes in the distribution of career personnel throughout the department. For example, personnel from parts of the department undergoing soft closure could be redistributed to what will be workload-intensive corners of the department, including national security–critical and transparency functions. All personnel with law enforcement capacity should be removed immediately from office billets and deployed to field billets to maxi- mize law enforcement capacity. Compliance for Grants and Other Federal Funding. The next Adminis- tration should take steps to restore lawfulness and integrity to the department’s massive regimen of federal grant programs, most of which are managed and dis- tributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Secretary should direct FEMA to ensure that all FEMA-issued grant funding for states, localities, and private organizations is going to recipients who are lawful actors, can demon- strate that they are in compliance with federal law, and can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission. All applicants and potential recipients of such grant funding should be required to meet certain pre- conditions for eligibility (except for receipt of post-disaster or nonhumanitarian funding) or should simply be considered ineligible for funding. Such preconditions should include at least the following: l Certification by applicants that they comply with all aspects of federal immigration laws, including the honoring of all immigration detainers. l Certification by applicants that they are both registered with E-Verify and using E-Verify in a transparent and nonevasive manner. For states

Financial Regulatory Agencies

Minimal
Vector: 58%
Pages: 866-868AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"HRES 283 is a procedural House resolution about committee membership and does not address financial regulatory agencies, SEC enforcement, CFTC reforms, or any of the substantive policies outlined in Project 2025's Financial Regulatory Agencies section."

— 833 — Financial Regulatory Agencies l Eliminate all administrative proceedings (APs) within the SEC except for stop orders related to defective registration statements. The SEC enforcement system does not need to have both district court cases and APs. Alternatively, respondents should be allowed to elect whether an adjudication occurs in the SEC’s administrative law court or an ordinary Article III federal court.24 l End the practice of delegating the decision to initiate an enforcement case. The SEC Chairman—and possibly the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)—should study whether other Commission delegation of authority to staff should be narrowed and whether sunsetting of such delegation of authority should be required. Congress should: l Require an Inspector General’s (or possibly a GAO) report regarding SEC information technology spending and contracting. Spending appears to be much too high, and IT contracting is poorly managed. l Statutorily limit the time for an investigation to two years with no extensions. Long investigations harm private parties and the quality of justice. With adequate management processes, the SEC should not need more than two years even for complicated matters. The SEC Chairman should: l Dramatically reduce the number of direct reports to the SEC Chairman. l Merge SEC offices that are performing similar functions. l Reduce the number of managers per employee. CFTC ADMINISTRATION AND IMPROVED COMMODITIES AND DERIVATIVES MARKETS Congress should: l Modernize the definition of commodity (which is now largely a laundry list of agricultural commodities)25 and clarify the treatment of digital assets. l Clarify through an express amendment to the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA)26 the circumstances that require a foreign swap trading platform to — 834 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a swap execution facility (SEF) under Sections 2(i)27 and 5h28 of the CEA. Currently, it is not clear whether having one or a small number of U.S. participants would require SEF registration under prior staff guidance, which has led foreign swap trading platforms to exclude all U.S. persons from their platforms or to go through the process of seeking an exemption from registration. l Amend Section 2 of the CEA to authorize the CFTC Chairman to remove the agency’s Executive Director without a Commission vote. l To augment Commissioners’ independence, establish funding amounts for the Commissioners’ offices by statute with adjustments for inflation, with no requirement for a Commissioner to obtain budget or expense approvals from the Chairman or the agency’s administrative staff. The CFTC should: l Allocate more resources to core agency functions rather than ancillary and support operations. l Replace the existing position limits rule, which reduces liquidity and makes markets more volatile, with further delegation of authority to the exchanges to set position limits and position accountability levels where appropriate for the relevant market. l Reduce overly prescriptive rules implementing the CFTC’s core principles. l Apply the definitions of “U.S. Person” and “Guarantee” in the CFTC’s 2020 rule on cross-border application of swaps regulations (2020 Cross-Border Rule)29 to the regulatory requirements that remain covered by the CFTC’s 2013 guidance on the subject (2013 Guidance).30 Currently, the definition of each of these foundational terms differs depending on whether the requirement in question is covered by the 2020 Cross-Border Rule or the 2013 Guidance. l Remove the regulatory categories of “affiliate conduit” and “foreign consolidated subsidiary” from the 2013 Guidance and the CFTC’s cross- border rule on margin for uncleared swaps,31 respectively. These categories were replaced by the concept of a “Significant Risk Subsidiary” for purposes of the 2020 Cross-Border Rule because of widespread market confusion and compliance difficulties arising from their broad and vague scope.

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About These Correlations

Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.

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