In 1947, aviation and film industry executive Howard Hughes testified before a hearing of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The hearings that followed were contentious, with the committee investigating Kaiser-Hughes Aircraft for receiving taxpayer dollars for aircraft that were never delivered, including the flying boat called the Hercules, also known as the Spruce-Goose. Hughes responded by accusing Committee Chairman Senator Brewster of singling out Kaiser-Hughes for scrutiny because Hughes declined to support Senator Brewster’s Community Airline Bill and Hughes opposed a merger of Trans World Airlines with Pan-Am. If any of this sounds familiar, it is likely because this hearing was dramatized in the movie The Aviator and televised film clips from the hearing are currently available on YouTube.
Using these hearings as an example, we hope to demonstrate how you can locate transcripts of committee hearings. As noted by the Government Publishing Office,
A hearing is a meeting or session of a Senate, House, joint, or special committee of Congress, usually open to the public, to obtain information and opinions on proposed legislation, conduct an investigation, or evaluate/oversee the activities of a government department or the implementation of a Federal law. In addition, hearings may also be purely exploratory in nature, providing testimony and data about topics of current interest.
In light of the information they contain, congressional committee hearings can often serve as a component in constructing a legislative history. Transcripts of committee hearings are not immediately available, however. As noted by the Congressional Research Service, “[p]rinted hearings…often are not published for months after the hearing, but are usually available for inspection in committee offices; witness testimony is often available on-line.” Knowing where to find these published hearings can sometimes be a challenge, and as such, we will go into the congressional committee hearing research process in greater detail below.
Please note that this page focuses on published hearings. Locating transcripts for hearings which were initially not published, but were later made available by the Congressional Information Service in microfiche and through online resources such as ProQuest, is the subject of the "Unpublished Congressional Hearings" section of this guide.
The two main print-based resources for published congressional committee hearings were both initially collected by the Congressional Information Service (CIS), and are titled CIS US Congressional Committee Hearings Index and the CIS Index (also known as the CIS Annual). The two resources are largely divided by coverage dates, with the CIS US Congressional Committee Hearings Index dealing with hearings from 1833 to 1969, and the CIS Annual dealing with hearings from 1970 to the present.
CIS Annual by 
CIS US Congressional Committee Hearings Index by To find the Hughes hearing from the 1940s, you would use the CIS Congressional Committee Hearings Index. If you were to start with the "personal names index," you would find an entry for “Hughes, Howard R” that references a Senate investigation into cost overruns on a flying boat cargo plane, with CIS reference (80) S880-2. If you did not know the name of the witness, you could use the "subjects and organizations index" and ultimately find the same reference number. The CIS reference number can be used to pull up the hearing on microfiche or ProQuest Congressional. This particular hearing spans several days and was published in several parts, so you would want to take advantage of the table of contents in the hearing to jump to particular exchanges of interest.
The subscription resources marked with a padlock 
are available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.
GPO's GovInfo contains select hearings published from 1957 to the present. To browse hearings, use the "Category" box on the home page, then select "Congressional Committee Materials" from the left menu, then select “Congressional Hearings” from the list of options.
Many congressional committees make recent hearing information, such as transcripts, pre-prepared testimony, and video, available on their websites. To locate recent House and Senate hearings on individual committee pages, we suggest utilizing Congress.gov committee landing pages. Simply select a committee from the committee landing page, and then click on the link to the committee’s webpage in the overview box. Further, if you click the “View video streams” link on the committee landing page, you can watch House committee hearings as they happen or view archived clips of recent hearings.
You can also locate House congressional committee hearing schedules and associated documents at the House Committee Repository website. The Repository contains selected House committee hearings from 2009 to the present.
