HACKER Q&A
📣 tlhunter

Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?


I was interested in skimming through the "Big Beautiful Bill" and I found the contents of it on congress.gov[1].

It comes in two formats: One is a text document with with column size restrictions that makes it very hard to read, worse than the text version of an IETF RFC. The second is a machine readable XML document which itself isn't easily read.

Are there any good tools for viewing these? I did find GovTrack.us but it seems to be down so I'm not sure if it solves this problem.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text

  👤 joshdata Accepted Answer ✓
Hi. I run GovTrack.

OP may have been unlucky on the timing. The site isn't usually down. Here's the link to the text of H.R. 1 on GovTrack: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1/text

We automatically add links to U.S. Code and other citations. In this case Congress.gov is missing rich formatting which we have (I'm not sure why they are missing it for this bill, normally they have it). GovTrack also allows making diff-like comparisons between bill versions and between bills (for example, you can see the last-minute changes made ahead of the vote on this bill).

Source code is available on GitHub if anyone wants to try making GovTrack better, although it's quite complicated because Congressional information is complicated and there's no real money behind this: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/

If anyone has particular thoughts on what would be helpful when viewing bill text --- within the realm of the information that is actually freely available --- I am all ears.

👤 a5huynh
Side-note, if anyone wants to really dig into all the data available about bills (including votes, attachments, etc.), this is a great place to start: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress

There's excellent documentation on the formats and how to access all the data.

👤 ellisv
My friend runs congress.dev which displays diffs

See https://congress.dev/bill/119/House/1/EH

👤 beej71
Should be at fun little XML parser to write, converting the thing to HTML.

Except that it's a government thing so the parser's probably not going to be little. :)

Edit: The thing's basically XHTML without any kind of header. UTF-8 encoding, it looks like. So a conversion tool would just need to wrap it up and add styling.

Edit: Despite hints that it's XHTML, it's not valid XHTML.

Edit: Stick this at the top of the file:

--------------------- 8< ---------------------

    

    

    H. R. 1

--------------------- 8< ---------------------

And add this to the bottom of the file:

--------------------- 8< ---------------------

--------------------- 8< ---------------------

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to write a script to do that. Automatically extracting the bill title should be Fun.

👤 rhdunn
See https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLS/resources. Specifically the billres.xsl and associated stylesheets. You can use those with the Saxon XSLT processor to transform the XML files into a HTML view similar to what the PDFs look like.
👤 ppourmand
I made an iOS app a while back that lets you read through/follow bills in congress: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/easy-congress/id1522413054

seems to be broken on the "Big Beautiful Bill" right now though :(, I'm taking a a look to see what's going on

👤 codingdave
PDF is here: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/one_big_beautiful_bil...
👤 sfennell
I always go to https://www.govtrack.us/ to view this sort of thing. I don't know if it is _good_ but it's a pretty good tool from my point of view
👤 davidgreenstein
https://dogeai.chat/ is the leader in the space. Highly recommend. Open source as well.

https://github.com/saihaj/DOGE-AI

👤 jasonthorsness
Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/
👤 telotortium
The XML/HTML document looks readable enough - no worse than a GNU HTML manual. You can add a stylesheet if you want.

https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr1/generated/BILLS-119hr...

👤 acgourley
Some friends just made this: https://www.congressionalrag.com/ - they need help from anyone interested, especially around pulling in more data sources.
👤 pacifika
What about the pdf
👤 ivape
There should at least be an AI sidebar on congress.gov. I think Americans would learn a whole lot with such a thing, but who wants to foot the bill for this one.
👤 maCDzP
I had a similar problem so I asked Claude to write a MCP that queries my governments ”bill API”. It worked remarkably well.
👤 joeyagreco
What did you have in mind for viewing options?
👤 enisdenjo
definitely look at https://dogeai.chat/ by @dogeai_gov on X
👤 Ylpertnodi
notebooklm.google.com?