Show HN: Govbase β Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts
130 points - today at 5:08 PM
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.
I'd love feedback from the community, especially on the data pipeline or what policy areas/features you feel are missing.
Comments
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I found it infeasible, but Iβm wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?
For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains some policy changes about housing.
In reality, the social posts no longer need to do anything but lie about whatever the title might mean.
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.