Bill limits fees and terms for court-appointed monitors.
S. 4917 — Monitor Accountability Act · Filed by John Kennedy (R-LA) · Introduced Jun 24, 2026 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
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What it does
The bill tells federal courts to make rules about monitors. Monitors are people who watch whether state and local governments follow court orders. The bill caps how much monitors can charge. It stops one person from being a monitor for many cases at once. Monitors can serve for 5 years but cannot be reappointed to the same case. Courts must tell the public before hiring a monitor. Courts must publish yearly reports on fees and work. If a case has a monitor for more than 6 years, a different judge takes over.
Who it affects
People in states and cities under court orders. Monitor companies and the judges who hire them. Governments that pay monitor fees.
One thing to notice
The bill applies to cases that already have monitors. Some long-running cases will have to switch judges and hire new monitors.
From the analysis of the bill text, linked under Primary records below.
Where it stands
- Jun 24, 2026 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Jun 24, 2026 — Referred to Senate Committee on the Judiciary · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
1 groups reported lobbying about this bill. They filed 1 reports from Jun 2026 to Jun 2026.
Those reports show $390,000 in lobbying spending. Each report lists about 4 bills. So that money was not all for this bill.
More groups named this bill than 0% of bills with any report.
John Kennedy, who sponsored the bill, received $113,800 from PACs for the 2026 election.
- Invesco Group Services, Inc. — $390,000 in 1 report
Lobbying is legal. These reports show who lobbied about this bill, not what changed.
Words to know
- monitor — A person a court hires to check if a government follows a court order.
- court orders — A judge's command that a person or government must do or stop doing something.
- lobbying — Trying to influence lawmakers about a bill. Companies and groups pay people to do this.
- PACs — Groups that collect money and give it to candidates for office.
- sponsored — To sponsor a bill is to introduce it in Congress and put your name on it.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (3,136 characters) on Sep 7, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 14,522 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-09-22.
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