How Just A Bill Works

Just A Bill exists to make U.S. federal legislation queryable and understandable for everyone. Bills can run thousands of pages, which makes generic "paste it into AI" workflows unreliable. We ingest the full official bill text, structure it section by section, and power Ask AI with grounded legislative context so users can ask specific questions and get verifiable answers. We never tell you how to vote and we never inject political opinions.

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.

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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.

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. 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)
4. 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.
5. 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.

Just A Bill is open source and community-driven. Our code is publicly available, and our data pipeline is fully automated. We welcome feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. If you spot an inaccurate summary, please contact us — we take accuracy seriously.