What Is the Congressional Nursing Caucus? Members, Priorities, and History

Part of Nurses on the Ballot, Nurse.org’s new research series for the 2026 midterm elections. More than 50 members of Congress belong to the House caucus dedicated to nursing, and this page keeps a current public accounting of it: membership, leadership, history, and the bills its leaders are prioritizing now.

There is a caucus in Congress whose stated mission is the nation’s 4.2 million registered nurses. Since 2003, the Congressional Nursing Caucus has been where nursing’s federal priorities find bipartisan sponsors, and if you’ve ever wondered who’s in it, what it works on, and what it has helped get done, this page is the answer, built from the caucus’s own records.

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In the caucus’s own words, from its January 2025 relaunch announcement: “The Congressional Nursing Caucus is a bipartisan group of legislators dedicated to advancing policies to support the nation’s 4.2 million registered nurses.” The same announcement says the caucus works to address the nursing shortage, bolster the workforce pipeline, and provide nurses with resources and tools.

In practice, that means sponsorship: the caucus’s current leadership is two Republicans and two Democrats, and the three bills its leaders are advocating for right now are sponsored by its own co-chairs, with the other leaders signed on as original cosponsors of each other’s bills.

Rep. Lois Capps, a California Democrat and registered nurse, founded the caucus in January 2003, fresh off the Nurse Reinvestment Act‘s passage, which she and her Republican counterpart had championed. The caucus was formed to keep educating Congress on nursing. Her official House biography described her as “founder and co-chair of the House Nursing Caucus,” and the House’s own records from that Congress list her alongside Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, as the caucus’s first leadership pair; Rep. Steven LaTourette of Ohio served as an early Republican co-chair in the years after.

The bipartisan structure has held ever since. Rep. David Joyce, an Ohio Republican, has helped lead the caucus since 2013, and today’s leadership is co-chairs Joyce and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), with vice co-chairs Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) and Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL), the caucus’s two nurses, holding two of its four leadership seats.

• The caucus helped renew nursing’s core federal funding law. Title VIII of the Public Health Service Act funds nursing itself: money for nursing schools, loan repayment for nurses who serve where they’re needed, and workforce programs. Renewing it takes an act of Congress. Caucus leaders led House votes to renew it in 2017 and 2019, and the renewal was signed into law in March 2020 as part of the CARES Act, through a House bill led by the caucus co-chairs.
• The Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act became law in 2022 with cosponsorship from caucus leaders and many of its members. The law funds programs to improve healthcare workers’ mental health and well-being. Caucus members supported it individually; it was a broad coalition’s win, and the caucus’s leaders were in it.
• The caucus’s officers have led Congress’s recognition of nursing itself, from National Nurses Week resolutions to the 2020 Year of the Nurse recognition, led by caucus officers. Recognition isn’t policy, but it’s the caucus doing exactly what a caucus is for: keeping nursing visible in the building where nursing’s laws get written.
• The caucus is a standing partner for nursing organizations on the Hill. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing describes working directly with the caucus’s four leaders to track legislation affecting nursing education, and caucus leaders have led member letters for healthcare funding, including a bipartisan 2020 push for direct hospital funding at the height of COVID-19.

Three priorities, provided to Nurse.org by the co-chairs’ offices, and all three are the co-chairs’ own bills:

• Reauthorizing Title VIII, again. The Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act of 2025 (H.R. 3593, sponsored by Joyce) would renew the programs that fund nursing education, loan repayment, and workforce development. It cleared a House subcommittee markup in September 2025, and its Senate companion (S. 1874) was approved by the Senate health committee and placed on the Senate calendar in July 2026.
• The I CAN Act (H.R. 1317, sponsored by Joyce). It would change Medicare and Medicaid rules so APRNs can practice to the extent their state licenses already allow: ordering cardiac and pulmonary rehab, broader roles in hospice certification, removing federal supervision barriers for CRNAs, and expanded functions for nurse-midwives. It doesn’t change any state’s scope of practice; it aligns federal payment rules with the licenses states already grant.
• The Nurse Faculty Shortage Reduction Act of 2026 (H.R. 7279, sponsored by Bonamici). Nursing schools turn away qualified applications because of faculty shortages and other capacity constraints, in large part because faculty pay can’t compete with clinical pay. This bill would fund a grant program supplementing early-career faculty salaries, tied to that pay gap, at $15 million a year for five years. Its Senate companion is bipartisan (Durbin and Murkowski).

This is the House’s nursing caucus (the Senate has its own), and it has 53 members as of September 2026, per the list provided to Nurse.org by the co-chairs’ offices: 40 Democrats and 13 Republicans, from 27 states plus the District of Columbia and Guam, whose non-voting delegates are both members. That Democratic tilt is its own small data point: the caucus leans one way, and as this year’s companion roster shows, the candidate class is more balanced while sitting nurse state legislators lean the other. Three partisan pictures, one profession.

Two members are nurses, and they aren’t just members: Kiggans, an adult-geriatric nurse practitioner, and Underwood, a registered nurse, are the caucus’s vice co-chairs.

*Membership as provided by the offices of the caucus co-chairs, September 2026; identities, parties, and districts verified against the Clerk of the House’s member list.

Some members carry the caucus’s work onto their own campaign pages. Co-chair Bonamici writes on her campaign site: “As a co-chair of the Congressional Nursing Caucus, I know that nurses are key to meeting our long-term health care goals. I introduced the bipartisan Nurse Faculty Shortage Reduction Act to close the pay gap and build a bench of educators ready to teach the next generation of nurses.” And Rep. Mike Thompson of California championed the Nurse Corps Tax Parity Act, writing that it “eliminates a totally unnecessary tax penalty on people entering the nursing profession.”

Our review of caucus members’ campaign sites found these two; the caucus itself exists to be the home for members’ nursing work, whether or not their campaigns feature it.

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🤔 Is your representative on this list? Tell us in the comments what you’d want the Nursing Caucus to take up next.

The membership list and the caucus’s current priorities were provided by the offices of the caucus co-chairs, Rep. Joyce and Rep. Bonamici, in September 2026. Nurse.org verified every member’s identity, party, and district against the Clerk of the House’s official member list and cross-checked the roster against the American Nurses Association’s published caucus list for the 119th Congress; bill facts come from Congress.gov and official records, linked throughout. We plan to update this page as the caucus’s membership and priorities change. If you spot something out of date, please tell us.

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