abigailhaddad/legislative-issue-tracker

Legislative Issue Tracker

Bills, legislative actions, floor speeches, hearings, and committee reports that touch a specific federal statute — currently the Paperwork Reduction Act (44 U.S.C. ch. 35, subch. I) — with every mention classified as amends, exempts, references, or related.

The distinction is the point: Congress amends the PRA rarely (254 bills) but exempts individual programs from it constantly (845 bills).

Built by abigail-64/legislative-issue-tracker. Everything here is derived from public government APIs (Congress.gov, GovInfo, EveryCRSReport.com). Only short passages around each statutory citation are stored — never full document text.

Files

data/*.parquet — pipeline state:

file	one row per
bills	bill (Congress.gov metadata: sponsor, dates, latest action, law)
actions	recorded legislative action
bill_issues	bill x issue link: classification, passages, version list
candidates	bill text version found by search or bulk-data scan
text_matches	(issue, package) analysis cache: classification + passages
text_diffs	consecutive text-version pair: change stats + issue-relevant hunks
speeches	Congressional Record section: speakers, speech vs inserted bill text
documents	hearing or committee report mentioning the issue
cosponsors	bill x cosponsor
crs	CRS report matched by title
scan_state	bulk-data scan watermark

site/*.json — the same data shaped for the web UI.

Quick start

import duckdb

duckdb.sql("""
  SELECT match_type, count(*) AS bills
  FROM read_parquet('hf://datasets/abigailhaddad/legislative-issue-tracker/data/bill_issues.parquet')
  GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC
""").show()

Caveats

• Classification is rule-based — regex over the clause containing each citation — not human-reviewed. confirmed = true marks the small number of hand-tagged rows.
• Coverage is 1993–present via GovInfo full-text search, plus bulk-data scans of the 113th Congress onward. Earlier bills are hand-tagged only.
• 44 U.S.C. ch. 35 also contains FISMA (subchapter II) and CIPSEA (subchapter III). Those are classified related, not PRA.
• In the Congressional Record, most mentions are bill or amendment text reprinted into the Record rather than a member speaking; speeches.mention_kind distinguishes them.