About LegislationPatch

Last updated: August 2026

LegislationPatch is an independent, nonpartisan project that explains U.S. federal legislation in plain English, patch-notes style. It has no political affiliation, no outside funding, and no advertising. The aim is simple: let anyone read what a bill actually does — section by section, in the bill's own terms — without wading through legislative jargon or relying on someone else's characterization of it.

How the analysis is produced

Every bill analysis is generated from the bill's official text, fetched from the Congress.gov API — not from press releases, news coverage, or secondhand summaries. GovInfo supplies the Congressional Record and any statute or chamber manual an analysis rests on. Before publication, each analysis is verified against that source text: every figure, date, and statutory citation must appear in the record, and every claim is re-read against the source in a separate adversarial pass over the finished draft, with the model that performed that pass recorded on the analysis's claim ledger. When a bill amends or extends another law, the referenced statute is fetched and read directly, so the numbers come from the actual text rather than from memory. That ledger — every claim checked, the verdict, and the source line behind it — currently covers 212 of the 219 analyses in the database; the seven added most recently do not carry one yet.

Three documents describe this in full: our methodology, which walks through exactly how a bill is sourced, read, and verified; our neutrality policy, which sets out where the line sits between neutral description and political framing; and our editorial standards and AI disclosure, which states precisely what the automated pipeline does, what a human editor does, and what is never automated.

Who runs it

LegislationPatch is edited by James Shearn, who built the site's source-verification pipeline and reviews and verifies every analysis and article before publication. The project is independently owned and operated, with no outside funding, no advertising, and no political affiliation.

What the site covers

LegislationPatch tracks federal bills and explains their contents, records how members voted on the roll calls tied to those bills, collects direct statements made on the House and Senate floor from the Congressional Record, and maintains profiles of members of Congress. Everything is drawn from official government sources and prepared ahead of time as static data — the site does not call live government APIs while you browse.

What the site deliberately avoids

The project does not apply editorial labels such as "landmark," "radical," or "common-sense" to legislation, does not endorse or oppose any bill or political position, and does not present predictions as fact. Where the likelihood of a bill advancing is discussed, it is framed in structural terms — sponsorship, stage, and recorded vote outcomes — rather than as a forecast. AI is used to help read and draft the analyses, but every published figure and citation is checked against the official text.

Corrections

Factual errors are corrected promptly and visibly. If you spot one, see the Corrections policy for how to report it and how corrections are logged.

Preferred sources on Google

Google lets each reader mark sites as preferred sources. Google's documentation states that content from a site a reader has selected is more likely to appear in Top Stories, and that it can carry a "preferred" badge there and in AI Mode and AI Overviews. LegislationPatch can be added as a preferred source on Google; the setting lives in your own Google account and can be changed there at any time.