[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
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Ask HN: 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
Author : tlhunter
Score : 79 points
Date : 2025-06-06 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
| beej71 wrote:
| 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< ---------------------
|
| <!DOCTYPE html>
|
| <html>
|
| <head> <meta name="viewport"
| content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
| <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>H. R. 1</title>
| <style> body { max-width: 40em;
| margin: auto; } .lbexTocSectionOLC {
| display: inline-block; } .lbexTocDivisionOLC {
| margin-top: 5ex; } </style>
|
| </head>
|
| --------------------- 8< ---------------------
|
| And add this to the bottom of the file:
|
| --------------------- 8< ---------------------
|
| </html>
|
| --------------------- 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.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| <html> and </html> are optional but I didn't try it with this
| file
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
| pacifika wrote:
| What about the pdf
| joeyagreco wrote:
| What did you have in mind for viewing options?
| codingdave wrote:
| PDF is here:
| https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/one_big_beautiful_bil...
| rhdunn wrote:
| 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.
| rhdunn wrote:
| There's also https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/FR/resources for
| federal register XML documents.
|
| Note: it could be worth checking the issues at
| https://github.com/usgpo/bulk-data/issues as some of those
| contain fixes and formatting improvements.
| a5huynh wrote:
| 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.
| joshdata wrote:
| I did much of that so I appreciate you saying that the
| documentation is excellent. :)
| mlinhares wrote:
| Thank you for your amazing service to this country!
| ivape wrote:
| 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.
| beart wrote:
| It's easy to imagine a non-technical user asking the AI a
| question and implicitly trusting the response as factual,
| without understanding anything about hallucinations.
| ivape wrote:
| Versus what? An intractable archive of unreadable documents?
| At the very least they'll get tractable information, which
| humans will always use on social media to make a point, which
| will then get fact checked. I prefer that loop. Right now the
| information is hidden in coffers and never gets taken for a
| loop.
| beart wrote:
| A root cause analysis would probably suggest the question -
| Why are our representatives passing intractable, unreadable
| documents as law and how can we prevent them from doing
| that? Or more generally, what changes can be made to our
| government institutions to improve clarity in communicating
| actions and decisions to votes?
|
| Yeah, it's naive thinking, and I'm well aware the
| obfuscation is sometimes the point.
|
| But I digress... My main takeaway here is that we should be
| considerate of what problems adding AI to the equation may
| cause. I'm old enough to have seen how "the new big thing"
| ends up getting applied to every problem space, without
| really thinking about the consequences.
| ivape wrote:
| _Why are our representatives passing intractable,
| unreadable documents_
|
| Best guess?
|
| 1) These are actual laws so they carry all the legal
| thoroughness
|
| 2) Like managers, they don't write the actual code (they
| don't do the actual writing of the bills). So managers
| don't really care just how awful the code can be (or in
| this case, just how intractable the bills are)
|
| 3) No one is code reviewing (the public is to uneducated
| to even do so)
|
| This leads to these things being drafted in the dark of
| night and passed in the dark of night. I'm open to AI in
| this case simply to even begin having insight.
| justanything wrote:
| How do you figure out if the whole or part of the response is
| a hallucination?
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| 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 :/
| thuanao wrote:
| Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress provides
| XML formatted bills and all their amendments and a feed of all
| changes to every bill.
|
| Oh and on the topic of party politics, Bill Clinton was the one
| who had them put things online in the first place with the GPO
| Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act, and Barack Obama
| and the Democrats expanded it via American Recovery and
| Reinvestment Act of 2009 - not the do-nothing Republicans.
| joshdata wrote:
| That's not really the right picture.
|
| Congress.gov, originally THOMAS.gov, was a product of the
| Republican Contract with America take-over of Congress in the
| mid 1990s. Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Issa for
| example, were helpful in expanding the information that
| Congress publishes publicly. In the last 15 years, efforts to
| make Congress publish more and better-structured information
| have been relatively bipartisan and, mostly, led by
| nonpolitical staff. I would not describe Democrats as having
| been the ones to have exclusively created the access to
| congressional information that we have today, although
| Democrats in recent years have led on government transparency
| and accountability issues generally, beyond the Legislative
| Branch.
|
| Changes that have required legislation have, as far as I'm
| aware, not really been influenced by the President, other
| than being signed into law, since they are Legislative Branch
| concerns and not Executive Branch concerns.
| bavent wrote:
| So use an LLM even though you admit immediately they make
| mistakes and you need to read the entire bill anyways?
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Maybe even today an LLM is better than hearing about what the
| bill contains from social media reposts. The more the actual
| text is accessible the better (and accessible is not just
| technically accessible, but also understandable to the
| reader).
| acgourley wrote:
| Some friends just made this: https://www.congressionalrag.com/ -
| they need help from anyone interested, especially around pulling
| in more data sources.
| ppourmand wrote:
| 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
| sfennell wrote:
| 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
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| notebooklm.google.com?
| joshdata wrote:
| 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.
| skadamat wrote:
| I would love a Genius.com / annotation layer on top of these
| bills too. Just a dream I'm sharing out loud for no particular
| reason :) love govtrack in general otherwise!
| joshdata wrote:
| Without commenting on the merits of that idea, I'll just say
| that I do not want to be the one who has to moderate user
| generated content.
| manquer wrote:
| Only if it is shared annotations is it a problem.
|
| It need not be shared , think more like a public notion/
| share point document with comments visible . I.e
| experts(users) can create their own individual annotated
| versions and share with others .
|
| As long as there is no single version of the annotations ,
| moderation is not needed
| telotortium wrote:
| 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...
| ellisv wrote:
| My friend runs congress.dev which displays diffs
|
| See https://congress.dev/bill/119/House/1/EH
| Game_Ender wrote:
| This is really great. Reading the bill raw feels like reviewing
| a diff with context set to 0.
| Terr_ wrote:
| What I find most frustrating are the bills written as prose-
| diffs themselves: "In some entirely different piece of law,
| Foo shall be inserted after Bar, with an overall effect and
| purpose which will not be described here."
| ellisv wrote:
| Yes. Many bills are modifying the US Code. So the bills are
| sort of like wordy patches.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| This site's font is very pleasant to read. Poking around the
| raw html reveals webkit antialiasing and a Google font called
| Nunito Sans.
| ellisv wrote:
| I'll let him know you like it.
| maCDzP wrote:
| I had a similar problem so I asked Claude to write a MCP that
| queries my governments "bill API". It worked remarkably well.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| definitely look at https://dogeai.chat/ by @dogeai_gov on X
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(page generated 2025-06-06 23:01 UTC)