House Members Ranked by Effectiveness: The CEL Data, July 2026 Roster

One ruler for 435 members

The Legislative Effectiveness Score is the closest thing to a batting average that exists for the House. It counts a member's own bills, weights them by substance, and tracks them through committee, the floor, and the president's desk. Fifteen metrics, one number, chamber average normalized to 1.0 (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025). It does not count viral hearing clips. It does not count fundraising emails. A member who dominates every news cycle and enacts nothing scores near zero, and several do.

This report applies one filter to that data: the member must still hold a House seat in July 2026. Every name above was checked against GovTrack's live roster of the 119th Congress. That filter matters more than usual this cycle. The House carried multiple vacancies into the summer of 2026, including seats left by the deaths of Doug LaMalfa and David Scott and the resignations of Eric Swalwell, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, and Tony Gonzales (Ballotpedia, Special Elections to the 119th Congress, 2026). None of those vacancies touched the members ranked here.

What the top of the table shows

Sam Graves posted an LES of 6.793, nearly seven times the chamber average. The mechanics were unglamorous: 17 sponsored bills, 8 passed the House, 4 signed as standalone law, including major transportation measures moved through the committee he chairs (Office of Rep. Graves, 2025). Don Bacon's 6.001 came with a different signature. CEL rated him the single best member of the House at getting his standalone bills substantially incorporated into other members' laws, which is how most lawmaking actually finishes now (Office of Rep. Bacon, 2025). GovTrack's incorporation-inclusive counter credits Bacon with 9 enacted bills, the most of anyone on this list.

The Democratic side of the table was built entirely in the minority, which makes it more impressive, not less. CEL's data shows majority-party members outscore minority members on average in every Congress, yet Joaquin Castro, Joe Neguse, and Dina Titus all cleared the top of their party, and Neguse reached seventh in the whole chamber with 108 introduced bills and 8 enactments (Office of Rep. Neguse, 2025; GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards). CEL also found that women in the House minority were among the most effective members of their party, a finding McBath, Tokuda, Titus, and Norton illustrate by name (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025).

The talent drain the ranking cannot show

Four of the twenty highest-rated performers of the 118th Congress are gone, and the ranking above is weaker for it. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the fourth-ranked Republican with an LES of 4.924, retired. John Curtis, fifth at 4.293, moved to the Senate. Marcus Molinaro, seventh at 3.951, lost his seat in 2024. Sheila Jackson Lee, who held one of the longest Exceeds Expectations streaks ever measured, died in July 2024 (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025; Washington Informer, 2025). CEL flagged this pattern explicitly: the members who know how to pass laws keep leaving, through retirement, ambition, or death, and the chamber's lawmaking capacity leaves with them. The 119th Congress will get its own scores in 2027. The open question is who fills the vacuum.

What zero means, and what it does not

The bottom five are current members whose 118th Congress record shows zero sponsored bills becoming law by GovTrack's count, which includes language incorporated into other measures. Within that group, the ranking runs by raw output: Al Green introduced 47 bills that went nowhere, Jim Jordan introduced 4. Jordan's case is the starkest in the data because he chaired the Judiciary Committee, and committee chairs are structurally positioned to convert bills into law at the highest rate in the chamber (GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards; CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025).

Honesty requires the other side of that coin. CEL's own methodology notes that a low score does not automatically mean a bad legislator; some members define their job as oversight, constituent service, or stopping bills, none of which this instrument measures. Thomas Massie enacts nothing by design. The scoreboard does not care about the design. It records what passed. Note also that the two instruments disagree at the margins: Titus, Norton, Meeks, and Davis earn strong CEL marks from bills that advanced without finishing, while GovTrack's stricter enactment counter shows zero. Both numbers are printed here because both are true.