Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?
39 comments
·June 6, 2025joshdata
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
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
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
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
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.
davidgreenstein
https://dogeai.chat/ is the leader in the space. Highly recommend. Open source as well.
ellisv
My friend runs congress.dev which displays diffs
Game_Ender
This is really great. Reading the bill raw feels like reviewing a diff with context set to 0.
Terr_
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
Yes. Many bills are modifying the US Code. So the bills are sort of like wordy patches.
CrimsonCape
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
I’ll let him know you like it.
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.
rhdunn
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.
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< ---------------------
<!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>--------------------- 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
<html> and </html> are optional but I didn't try it with this file
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
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
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
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
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