Methodology

Where our data comes from

You should not have to take our word for anything. Here is every source we use, what we generate, and what we can get wrong.

Primary sources

Bills, sponsors, status, actions
The Congress.gov API (Library of Congress), with full bill text from GovInfo (U.S. Government Publishing Office). Every bill page links directly to its official record so you can check us.
Roll-call votes
The official tallies published by the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. Member names, parties, states, and positions are reproduced from those records. We do not infer, estimate, or reconstruct a vote.
A bill's status
Derived from the bill's full action history, not just its most recent action — otherwise a procedural motion can make a bill look passed when it is not. A motion to proceed, a cloture vote, or a discharge petition is never counted as passage.

Where we use AI — and where we don't

Never used for facts. Vote counts, who voted which way, sponsors, dates, and status are read directly from the official record. No language model touches them.

We use a language model for exactly three things, and all three are labeled on the page where they appear:

  • The plain-language summary — a short description of what a bill does, generated from the bill's official title and description.
  • Key provisions — bullet points drawn from the official Congressional Research Service summary, where one exists.
  • The weekly briefing (our blog) — the connecting prose between the week's events. The events themselves are pulled from government records by database query; the model is handed only those facts and is not permitted to add to them, invent a number, or assign a motive. A person reviews and publishes every issue, and each post names the model that drafted it and links every source it used. We only publish an issue when the week produced enough on the record to be worth your time — a quiet week gets no post, rather than a padded one.
What that means for you. A generated summary can be incomplete, can miss nuance, and can be wrong. It is a starting point, not a citation. Every bill page links to the official text — if a summary and the bill disagree, the bill is right and we are wrong, and we want to know about it.

How current is it?

Bills and their actions sync daily from Congress.gov. Roll-call votes are pulled once the Clerk or the Senate publishes the official tally, which is usually the same day as the vote but can lag. Congress itself is the bottleneck, not us — when the official record is slow, so are we, and we would rather be late than guess.

Corrections

We publish the public record, and the public record is what holds us accountable too. If anything on this site is wrong — a vote, a date, a summary, a name — tell us and we will fix it. Corrections take priority over everything else in the inbox.

Report an error

Independence

Our public pages carry advertising, which is what pays for keeping them free. The signed-in product carries none. Advertisers have no influence over what we cover, how bills are summarized, or how anything is ranked — ad revenue buys placement next to the content, never inside it. We take no money from campaigns, PACs, or political organizations. See our Privacy Policy for exactly what our ad partners collect.