Colophon
A clear, independent view of the U.S. Congress.
Bills.Congress is a public-interest project that reorganises the government's own data into a calmer, more readable record of the laws being made on your behalf.
Why this exists
Government data, made human-readable.
Congress.gov publishes everything you need to follow legislation — but it's optimised for legislative staff, not citizens. Titles are jargon, status codes are cryptic, and you have to know what you're looking for before you can find it. Bills.Congress takes the same primary data and presents it the way a newspaper of record would: clearly indexed, plainly summarised, fast to read.
How it works
Built on public data, processed transparently.
- 01
Direct ingestion from Congress.gov
We pull bill text, sponsor data, and status changes from the official Congress.gov API. No scraping, no intermediaries.
- 02
Continuous synchronisation
A scheduled job keeps our database in step with the public record. Every bill page shows when its data was last refreshed.
- 03
Plain-English summaries
Long-form bill text is condensed into clear summaries by an AI model — never replacing the original, only making it easier to enter.
- 04
Open data, open code
The source code, schema, and pipeline are all on GitHub. You can host your own copy or contribute back changes.
Get involved
Open source, by design.
Every line of code, every data transformation, and every AI-generated summary prompt is available to inspect. If you find something incorrect or have an idea, please open an issue or pull request on GitHub.