[HN Gopher] Show HN: Govbase - Follow a bill from source text to...
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Show HN: Govbase - Follow a bill from source text to news bias to
social posts
Govbase tracks every bill, executive order, and federal regulation
from official sources (Congress.gov, Federal Register, White
House). An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language
summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group. It also
ties each policy directly to bias-rated news coverage and
politician social posts on X, Bluesky, and Truth Social. You can
follow a single bill from the official text to how media frames it
to what your representatives are saying about it. Free on web,
iOS, and Android. https://govbase.com I'd love feedback from the
community, especially on the data pipeline or what policy
areas/features you feel are missing.
Author : foxfoxx
Score : 130 points
Date : 2026-03-02 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (govbase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (govbase.com)
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Is it federal-only?
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Yes but state level actions are definitely on the roadmap!
| petcat wrote:
| > An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language
| summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group.
|
| Wont this process be inherently biased by itself? Usually
| attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things
| in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally
| omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that
| will inform one perspective or another.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Very true. We're constantly trying to refine this and
| eventually plan on hiring policy researchers for a human in the
| loop but we just don't have the funding for that currently. We
| are trying to be transparent for how our scoring does work
| which you can read more about here:
| https://govbase.com/methodology
|
| The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just
| the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real
| example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal
| could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making
| content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban
| hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that
| alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that
| ignores the larger context of where that option even came from
| and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we
| know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly
| trying to optimize to get the larger picture.
| schreiaj wrote:
| As someone who has been working on this space for a while (not
| affiliated with govbase) this is really hard. Between
| eliminating the sycophancy that seems baked into LLMs and
| dealing with generalized hallucinations - it's freaking hard. I
| spent this weekend trying to figure out how to get my system to
| stop telling me the SAVE Act would be fine because it doesn't
| say what the process for if birth certificate doesn't match
| current id.
|
| No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a
| rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register
| for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial
| agent to see if that can spot gaps.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Looks interesting, but trending social only shows X which will
| lean conservative. Obviously Bluesky/Reddit will lean left but it
| should presumably show all bias influences? I don't think Truth
| Social should be included as its such a niche.
|
| Generally looks like a potentially excellent resource for
| marketing to media platforms.
|
| Edit: I found a Bluesky one but had to scroll down a lot. If
| that's to do with relative lack of activity it should probably be
| clearly explained.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! We mainly include Truth social since
| Trump and a few of his closest administration are active on
| there and a large goal of Govbase is to follow the story from
| Trump posting about tariffs, the news reacting, the EO
| happening, etc.
|
| I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming
| more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However,
| most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the
| most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active
| on X than Bluesky.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| Sad news is that bluesky is on a decline while truth social is
| increasing.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-...
|
| I wonder what will happen to trans kids in the coming years.
| Trans people shape the soul of the country (since the last 3
| years)
| verdverm wrote:
| It doesn't look like truth social has grown much the last
| year, sits around 10% of bluesky by active user count. Would
| be interesting to see more detailed metrics about the amount
| of content and engagement.
|
| Transgender has been a part of humanity forever, just like we
| see in other areas of nature. Here's some history going back
| 150+ years: https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-
| history-10-trans-tra...
|
| Zine: https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-
| trailblazers-30-liv...
|
| Some perspective, if you have an ARM CPU, it's thanks to
| Sophia Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And if you have a CPU at all, it's thanks in part to Lynn
| Conway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
|
| I expect it's worth looking into the ActivityPub Fediverse,
| or the applicable IndieWeb protocols (e.g. the linkback
| quartet: refback, trackback, pingback, and Webmention), to
| measure what people are saying. None of these have global
| feeds, though, so you have to deal with the conceptual
| complexity of _measurement_. (You have to deal with this
| anyway with Twitter, because of bot activity, but it 's
| easier to deal with "this is an upper bound" than "this
| estimate may be too high _or_ too low, and we 'd have to
| investigate further in order to find out which".)
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Why does Forbes post intentionally misleading charts?
|
| The one for Bluesky goes from 9M DAU -> 3.5M DAU
|
| The one for X goes from 149M DAU -> 128M DAU
|
| Yet, the Y axis of both charts are wildly out of proportion
| to make it look like they are equivalent, which is also
| implied by the headline but clearly not true.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Also, neither is zero based, making a 60% drop (bluesky)
| and a 15% drop (x) look comparable.
| pronouncedjerry wrote:
| Not able to create account via Apple - invalid_request: Invalid
| web redirect url.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thank you! The web app launched less than a month ago so
| definitely still working on bugs. I will get this fixed today.
| I appreciate the notice.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Should be fixed! If you'd like to try again. Thank you.
| rgeers wrote:
| This looks pretty interesting. How are you linking the related
| news for each policy item?
| sourcegrift wrote:
| If bluesky is included no reason to not include mastodon,
| threads, instagram,
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Understandable. Our priority right now is politician and agency
| posts though and these accounts are just not very active on
| mastodon or threads. We can look further into it and another
| comment mentioned this too.
| verdverm wrote:
| There are two parts here
|
| 1. Platforms politicians, governments, and media
|
| 2. Platforms which have an open (and free?) API
|
| Bluesky seems to be the only one covering both, though less
| coverage on #1 than others, minus Mastodon
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Can you prompt the AI to highlight some "hidden/unexpected
| causes"?
|
| For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains
| some policy changes about housing.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| I think that's a good idea to highlight "unexpected impact".
| Our system gets the whole policy for analysis so if there is
| something like housing impacts within a medical focused bill,
| Renters and Home Owners impacts should show up.
| healsdata wrote:
| The current summary on the home page contains bias / one-sided
| reporting.
|
| > While the administration describes the strikes as a necessary
| move to stop nuclear weapons, the conflict has already seen
| accidental friendly fire and threats of a ground invasion.
|
| The balance to the assertion "this was necessary" isn't "but
| there's been some consequences" -- it is an exploration of the
| truth of the assertion.
| benzible wrote:
| And the legality of it as well.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| I agree and will be taking this feedback seriously. Daily
| briefings need more refinement since that is the first thing a
| user reads.
| 1shooner wrote:
| How are the consequences of war not germane to its necessity?
| stonogo wrote:
| They are, of course, but there are two different consequences
| involved in this assessment. One is "stop nuclear weapons"
| (the converse would be "do not stop nuclear weapons") and the
| other is "friendly fire incidents" (the converse would be "no
| friendly fire incidents"). Neither are directly related to
| the other, since the former is specific to this engagement
| and the latter happens in _any_ combat.
| gwerbin wrote:
| That's the same kind of non-balance you see in human-authored
| news all the time, to be fair.
| xnx wrote:
| Well intentioned, but very naive.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| We're early stage, but I believe there's a space between news
| and actual policy that no one's filling well. If you can show
| people that their representatives are making their lives better
| or worse, with real policy behind it, they'll care.
|
| Right now, too many people are consuming misinformation from
| sources they believe are legitimate, and increasingly from
| social media where real people are getting their news. We need
| to connect the policy, the personal impact ("you're losing your
| insurance because of X"), the news, and what politicians are
| actually saying, all in one place, to bring real facts to the
| misinformation and make government more transparent.
| legitas wrote:
| I agree but what's your reasoning? Politico pro subs or just
| generally that no one cares?
| tangotaylor wrote:
| I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow
| what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from
| ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy
| impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government
| transparency so people know how their representatives are
| spending their time and who they're actually working for.
| LPisGood wrote:
| This works great for international geo-politcs as well. It's
| much more important to watch what leaders do than listen to
| what they say.
| tangotaylor wrote:
| This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way
| more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things
| just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act"
| cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a
| balanced budget (wtf).
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thanks! This actually started as a mobile app. I hope you check
| that out too!
| eiiot wrote:
| The dismiss button on the top banner doesn't work after I click
| onto the trial page.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! We've tested it on a few different
| browsers. Can I just get what browser you're using and if on
| mobile? Thanks!
| foxfoxx wrote:
| For context, this is a solo project I've been building over the
| past year while working full-time. I've been responding as "we"
| in the comments since I got used to doing it other places lol
|
| Looking for feedback and advice. I'm an engineer, not a
| journalist or policy researcher, so a lot of this domain is still
| new to me despite working on it for a year.
| waterproof wrote:
| Love the idea. Thoughts from a UI/UX point of view, on mobile:
|
| * Focus on the policy stuff since that's your differentiator.
| Put it front and center, currently it's below the "trending
| news". Nobody needs another trending news feed. I'd cut it
| entirely.
|
| * Make your differentiator hyper-obvious at a glance on the
| front page. Right now your above-the-fold is dominated by a
| wall of AI generated text. It should include a tagline for your
| site and visuals that people won't get elsewhere.
|
| * Your UI screams "vibe coded" which does not build confidence.
| Look to other authoritative sites for visual cues - consider a
| serif for headlines, make your spacing more thoughtful and
| consistent, reduce or remove your border radius.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Thanks! I'll look into these UX/UI ideas. As for the news,
| it's front and center because I want Govbase to be a site/app
| people regularly visit and policy does move slow. Even when a
| bill is introduced it can take weeks for the actual text
| content of the bill to show up on congress.gov. Plus on
| weekends/recess the government doesn't move.
|
| I am planning to bring out more of the impact highlights from
| the policies to see what's "trending" or what certain reps
| are working on but just plans for now.
| gwerbin wrote:
| Why chase engagement? If policy is slow-moving then people
| can visit weekly. Or make an RSS feed. Unless you're
| planning to go ad monetized or worse...
| LPisGood wrote:
| I started but could not finish a project I was calling
| "g(overnm)it blame" - the idea was to track each bill through
| committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see
| which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of
| the final bill.
|
| I found it infeasible, but I'm wondering if you saw rich enough
| data while making this that you think such a project is viable?
| jrussino wrote:
| Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems
| like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly.
| The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments
| and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the
| PR is accepted/rejected on a vote.
|
| Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not
| do it this way?
| LPisGood wrote:
| I think they pretty much do, it's just not recorded as such
| in an easily retrievable format.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| From what I understand, it depends on the stage. The United
| States Code certainly tracks any and all amendments, and
| you can fully trace which member introduced which
| amendment, when and where it passed, and even verbatim
| floor debate.
|
| However, the draft stage isn't documented this way. Members
| negotiate whatever between themselves (well, really their
| staffers) and this happens over email, in discussions, via
| Word documents - whatever works.
|
| I guess in the git metaphor, drafts are in flux while being
| worked on as a commit, and are squashed and then accessible
| as such squashed commits once initially introduced or
| whenever they lead to bill amendments. You can't
| necessarily track down what member was responsible for a
| specific sentence in an amendment.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The thing is that there is a voting process eventually so
| it can at least in principle be known which version is
| proposed by which legislator, or which committee.
| showerst wrote:
| The people behind changes aren't actually as attributable
| as it sounds though because amendment text gets
| collaborated on, so showerst might propose an amendment
| with the key parts of LPisGood's wishlist in it, and then
| the bill itself will die and then various parts will get
| cherry picked into an omnibus bill in 6 months anyway.
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| Curious about the X/social feature, technically. How are you
| getting the data? Is it via official APIs or scraping
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Some of the headlines do not make sense, e.g.
| https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc. But overall I
| think this is a great idea.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Yes I just noticed this bug today where there is some character
| limit impacting story headlines. I appreciate the feedback and
| will be looking into it today.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Feels a bit strange to use or at least not what I was expecting.
| I'm not sure having a "feed" the way it does is even appropriate,
| but assuming that's what it will be, so be it. The titles,
| however, read like headlines even under the "Policy" tab, and it
| isn't until clicking through that I can see the title of the bill
| in question and some brief description of it. I was expecting
| something more like a list of bills with outbound links to
| discussions and press releases where they may be.
|
| I'm not sure the bullet points make a lot of sense on the
| impacts, either. The first one right now is a bill to change
| security rules for hospitals and healthcare systems that offer
| remote logins to retrieve patient details. You only find that's
| what it is by scrolling all the way to the bottom and finally
| reading the summary, but first you see a list of impacted parties
| and it highlights people with chronic illnesses and tribal
| members. I think I at least understand the logic of the first
| one, assuming chronically ill log into patient portals more often
| than healthier people, but it feels somehow facile, like saying a
| bill about highway maintenance affects drivers more than non-
| drivers. No shit. That isn't really an insight and shouldn't be
| above the actual content of the bill.
|
| The "source information" is also all the way at the bottom even
| though, personally, it's what I would care about the most. And it
| has no links at all. You can look up the bill number and find it
| in the congressional database, but why not include a direct link?
| The news snippets link to the sources they came from. Why not the
| bills themselves?
|
| So actually, I can see now there is a link to the bill itself.
| It's just all the way at the bottom and not part of the source
| summary, whereas the news summaries are tiles that also act as
| links all on their own. I guess the question is why make that
| different and why put the link I most care about all the way at
| the bottom beneath all of the information? Not gonna lie, though.
| I almost hesitate to ask because I fear the answer is there is no
| known reason. You asked an AI to put together a page and this is
| what it did. There is no knowable "why" and even though you're
| publishing this as if it's your product being created based on
| your design decisions, it isn't.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| So policy feeds are dynamic news headlines because no one
| really wants to click on or understands:
|
| "Making further consolidated appropriations for the fiscal year
| ending September 30, 2026, and for other purposes."
|
| This is similar to how most people don't want to read the raw
| source bill text which is why it's at the bottom. The reason
| policies aren't direct links to congress.gov is because I've
| spent more time than most on congress.gov and the federal
| register and on one wants to do that.
|
| My first commit on this project was Feb 22, 2025 so I'm sure
| you're happy to find out there is plenty of "why" to my answers
| and that these are all my design decisions.
| scronkfinkle wrote:
| I've been working on the data processing side of legal text with
| https://www.wordstodata.com/
|
| Your work seems more targeted at tracking the real world impact
| of the bill rather than the changes it makes to the legal code,
| but a feature on my roadmap is having bill data also be easily
| linkable to the votes of politicians so you can track the effect
| politicians have on the legal code per member. Do you plan to
| build a member tracker on top of this as well? I think it would
| be super cool to be able to tie news events to a track record of
| votes by member of congress.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Yes! If you go to the engage tab you can look up some reps and
| the policies they're sponsoring but I plan on giving impact
| scores and where certain reps are focusing their time in the
| future.
| lunatuna wrote:
| Amazing start and look forward to see it evolve. Reminds me a lot
| of MIT's Open Government Information Awareness [0]. But really
| like the different track that this takes. I really hope to see
| this become something people go to.
|
| Suggestion that you increase the education of what you're doing
| and how. For example looking at the Home Energy Freedom Act [1]
| some direction to more understanding for each of the sections
| would be great - what is the process for Legislative Progress -
| how is the Impact Analysis done. I also couldn't quite figure out
| if there was a narrative that was being pushed by the parties and
| how that aligns with media. I like the media ratings though.
|
| [0] - https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-government-
| infor... [1] - https://govbase.com/policy/bill-119-hr-4758
| seany wrote:
| What's the recommended way to consume this with other ai? What
| kind of api is available?
| some_random wrote:
| Overall I love it, my biggest critisism so far is that the impact
| score seems overly opinionated and overly broad in some cases.
| For example, https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 lists on
| the policy page as positively affecting "Snap Food Stamps" which
| doesn't seem to be relevant although I don't have pro to see the
| reasoning.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Checkout has been fixed for anyone who wanted to try Pro!
| cyanydeez wrote:
| One would, naively assume, there's some skew that slowly happens
| between the source text and the social posts.
|
| In reality, the social posts no longer need to do anything but
| lie about whatever the title might mean.
| foxfoxx wrote:
| Right and the goal with Govbase is to show that disconnect in
| plain view. Hold representatives accountable to their actions
| against their words having them right next to each other.
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