Congress (the House or the Senate) holds various types of hearings. Hearings can be about the budget and appropriations, investigation and oversight, nominations, or concerning legislation. It generally takes several months, and in some cases years, for hearings to be published. It is up to the individual House or Senate Committees as to if and when these materials are published. This research guide will help researchers navigate the location of congressional hearings, with an emphasis on recent testimony.
To discover when hearings will be held you need to consult calendars. The easiest way to do this is to consult the Senate and House Committee pages: Senate Committees | House Committees.
It may also be useful to view the House Calendars or the Senate Hearings Schedule.
Various private transcription companies sit in on congressional hearings and record transcripts. One of them that provides access to selected transcripts is Federal News Service. Only hearings from the last 30 days are accessible through this service.
Another source for recent transcripts is ProQuest Congressional. You will need to search for "All fields including full text" in order for this to work properly. For example, if we wanted to read congressional testimony from hearings conducted on the Volkswagen emission scandal you could search like this:
LexisNexis Academic has some of these transcripts. To get to these you need to point LexisNexis Academic to CQ Congressional Testimony as the Source.
Published hearings are available from the Government Publishing Office FDsys service. Print hearings for older years are available through the University of Denver Library catalog.
