Tools
We develop and incubate tools for Congress, then urge Congress to adopt them. Congress routinely takes inspiration from us and creates its own user-friendly resources as a result.
We’re working to improve innovation within the Leg branch, but for now, we provide a little help from the outside.
Our tools place important federal legislative information in the hands of the public and key intermediaries, such as public interest advocates, journalists, and community activists.
responds to Congressional Research Service’s ongoing failure to reliably post historical CRS reports by publishing all the reports we and our partners come across in one place for free.
is a tool we developed along with Ari Hershowitz of GovTrack to track legislative ideas, or memes, over time. BillMap is incorporated into GovTrack. It identifies legislation in the same congress with similar content, and also identifies similar legislation considered in prior Congresses in one place so it is easy for lawmakers, Hill staff, and other stakeholders to better understand its history and make informed decisions on the legislation.
We’re pressuring Congress to develop a similar program so the institution can learn from its own history and patterns. As usual, the code we used is open source.
Learn more about it from this presentation we made to the Congressional Data Task Force in July 2021.
one of our older projects, turns PDFs of federal legislation into text files. It provides a formatted document that you can download and edit with a word processor program.