How Just A Bill Works

We ingest official bill text, preserve its section structure, and analyze the language against the source itself. Our AI summaries are grounded in each section's exact wording and include direct evidence quotes so users can verify every claim in context.

Our goal is simple: make legislation easier to understand without sacrificing accuracy or source integrity.

Every bill on Just A Bill is sourced directly from official U.S. government endpoints. We do not use blogs, news articles, or third-party opinion sites as sources for bill text or metadata.

After ingestion, that structure is preserved end-to-end so analysis and retrieval stay anchored to source language rather than outside commentary.

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  Congress.gov API — Bill metadata (number, title, status, sponsors, actions, committees) is fetched from the official Congress API.
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  GovInfo (GPO) — Full bill text is sourced from the Government Publishing Office, which publishes the authoritative text of every bill.
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  Automated Sync — Our system checks for new and updated bills daily. When a bill advances (e.g., passes committee, gets amended), we automatically pull the latest version and re-process it.

The system uses n8n workflows to pull bill text word-for-word from official sources and display it as evidence alongside AI-generated summaries. N8N runs daily on a dedicated AWS server, orchestrating three core workflows:

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  Bill Injection Workflow: Pulls new and updated bill text from Congress.gov and GovInfo, parses it into structured sections, and queues it for analysis.
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  Popularity Workflow: Tracks bill activity, voting trends, and congressional actions to surface the most relevant legislation.
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  Enacted Bill Injection Workflow: Monitors bills that have been signed into law and ensures they're processed and available with their final text.

Technical Note: All bill text is pulled directly from official government sources. Summaries are AI-generated but always reference the original text as evidence.

Our core problem and solution:

1. Problem: Bills can be thousands of pages, so putting raw legislation into a generic AI prompt is impractical and often leads to weak or incomplete answers.
2. Solution: Every bill is scraped from official sources and pre-processed into structured sections so Ask AI can retrieve relevant legislative context before answering.
3. Reading method: We process bills in order and ground responses in each section's exact words, effectively page-by-page and line-by-line.
4. Bill-text output: Section processing and retrieval are tied directly to bill text, producing:
   • Plain-English summary bullets (up to 10)
   • Evidence quotes (1–3 short quotes copied directly from the bill text)
   • Uncertainties (anything unclear or missing from the text)
5. No outside invention: If enough support cannot be found in text, the system returns uncertainty instead of guessing. We do not inject unsupported claims about effects, costs, or implications.
6. Bill-level overviews: We still generate concise bill overviews, but Ask AI is now the primary interface for specific bill questions.

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  Neutrality: We do not endorse, oppose, or frame any bill as "good" or "bad." Our summaries describe what the text says — nothing more.
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  Transparency: Every section summary includes evidence quotes so you can verify that the summary reflects the actual bill text. We also link directly to the official bill page on Congress.gov.
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  Freshness: Bill metadata and status are synced daily from the Congress API. When a bill is amended or advances, we pull the updated text and regenerate summaries for changed sections.
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  Accuracy limitations: AI answers and summaries can occasionally miss nuances or misinterpret dense legal language. We encourage users to check the official text for any provisions that affect them directly. Every page includes a link to the official source.

Just A Bill lets you vote on legislation at two levels:

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  Quick vote: Support or oppose the entire bill with one click. Available to everyone, no account required.
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  Section-by-section vote: Vote on each individual section after reading the summary and evidence. Requires a free verified account. This gives you a personalized recap showing which parts you support and oppose.
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  Results: Aggregate vote results are shown publicly (% support, % oppose, total voters). We separate verified and community votes for transparency.

We welcome feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. If you spot an inaccurate summary, please contact us — we take accuracy seriously.