Why We Built Congress-Decoded
Making the work of Congress accessible to every American — not just the people who already follow politics.
The Problem
Congress.gov is the official record of everything Congress does — but it was built for policy researchers, not everyday citizens. The interface is dense, the language is technical, and drawing any meaningful conclusion requires hours of cross-referencing. Most Americans have no idea what bills are currently being debated, which of their representatives sponsored legislation, or how productive any given Congress actually was.
Our Approach
Congress-Decoded pulls data directly from the official Congress.gov API maintained by the Library of Congress. Campaign finance information — including donor contributions to members of Congress — comes from the Federal Election Commission (FEC.gov), the official government source for federal campaign finance records. We use AI to translate legislative language into plain English — describing what a bill actually does, not just what it is named. Every summary, every score, every chart links back to its primary source so you can verify anything we show you.
Non-Partisan by Design
We have made deliberate design choices to avoid any appearance of political bias. Our color scheme uses neutral tones throughout the interface. Party colors (blue for Democrat, red for Republican) appear only as data labels in charts — never as design choices that could imply favoritism. Our effectiveness scoring formula is published publicly and applied identically to every Congress regardless of which party was in control. We do not editorialize, endorse, or recommend any candidate or party.
How It Works
An automated pipeline runs nightly, pulling updated bill data from Congress.gov. Campaign finance records are ingested from the FEC API on a regular basis. New and updated bills are sent to Claude AI with a structured, non-partisan prompt that instructs it to describe what the bill does, who it affects, and how it changes existing law — without political framing. Summaries are stored and served statically, so the site is fast and reliable regardless of API availability. Note: some bills never have legislative text uploaded to Congress.gov by their sponsors — typically bills that were introduced but saw no further action. When a bill has no text available, our system cannot generate a plain-English summary for it. The bill will still appear in our database with all other available information (sponsor, status, policy area, vote history), but the summary field will indicate that no text was available from Congress.gov.
Built By
Congress-Decoded is a project of Advanced Cyber Security Protection (ACSP). Our background is in translating complex technical subjects into clear, actionable information for non-technical audiences. We applied that same philosophy to civic data. If you can understand a cybersecurity risk without being an IT professional, you should be able to understand what your Congress is doing without being a policy analyst.