Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts

The current summary on the home page contains bias / one-sided reporting.

> 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.

For context, this is a solo project I've been building over the past year while working full-time. I've been responding as "we" in the comments since I got used to doing it other places lol

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.

I've been working on the data processing side of legal text with https://www.wordstodata.com/

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.

I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.

> An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group.

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.

Amazing start and look forward to see it evolve. Reminds me a lot of MIT's Open Government Information Awareness [0]. But really like the different track that this takes. I really hope to see this become something people go to.

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

Overall I love it, my biggest critisism so far is that the impact score seems overly opinionated and overly broad in some cases. For example, https://govbase.com/policy/fr-2026-03380 lists on the policy page as positively affecting "Snap Food Stamps" which doesn't seem to be relevant although I don't have pro to see the reasoning.

Looks interesting, but trending social only shows X which will lean conservative. Obviously Bluesky/Reddit will lean left but it should presumably show all bias influences? I don't think Truth Social should be included as its such a niche.

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.

This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act" cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget (wtf).

Curious about the X/social feature, technically. How are you getting the data? Is it via official APIs or scraping

I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill.

I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?

Checkout has been fixed for anyone who wanted to try Pro!

This looks pretty interesting. How are you linking the related news for each policy item?

Can you prompt the AI to highlight some "hidden/unexpected causes"?

For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains some policy changes about housing.

One would, naively assume, there's some skew that slowly happens between the source text and the social posts.

In reality, the social posts no longer need to do anything but lie about whatever the title might mean.

The dismiss button on the top banner doesn't work after I click onto the trial page.

Is it federal-only?

Not able to create account via Apple - invalid_request: Invalid web redirect url.

What's the recommended way to consume this with other ai? What kind of api is available?

Some of the headlines do not make sense, e.g. https://govbase.com/story/pvxDaH9fXqXUj8yu9Plc. But overall I think this is a great idea.

If bluesky is included no reason to not include mastodon, threads, instagram,

Feels a bit strange to use or at least not what I was expecting. I'm not sure having a "feed" the way it does is even appropriate, but assuming that's what it will be, so be it. The titles, however, read like headlines even under the "Policy" tab, and it isn't until clicking through that I can see the title of the bill in question and some brief description of it. I was expecting something more like a list of bills with outbound links to discussions and press releases where they may be.

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.

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Well intentioned, but very naive.