How this is made
The site's only value is that a reader can check it. This page says how each kind of statement is produced and what it is not.
This site is only worth using if you can check it. So here is how it is made.
When we show the book's words, a computer makes sure they are really in the book, on the page we name. If they are not, the site will not go up.
When we show a thing the government did, we get the date and the record straight from the government's own files. We never type those in from memory.
When we put it in plain words, a computer checks how hard the words are to read. If they are too hard, we have to write it again.
We do not cover the whole book yet. Where we have gaps, we say so.
Three kinds of statement, never blurred
What the document says. A verbatim quotation with the page it appears on, linking to that page in the publisher's own PDF. Every quotation is checked against the extracted source text when the site is built. A quotation that does not appear on the page it cites fails the build, so a misquotation cannot be published by mistake.
What has happened. Executive orders and other actions, each with its date, its Federal Register citation and a link. These are fetched from the Federal Register's own API and cached; the build compares every citation on the site against that record and fails on a mismatch. Citations are never typed from memory.
What people say about either. Attributed to whoever said it, and never written in the site's own voice.
Modality is recorded verbatim
A document can say must, should, should consider, or might be considered in the future. These are different claims, and a great deal of public argument treats a hedged aside as a firm plank, in both directions. Each proposal therefore carries the document's own verb, quoted, so a reader can weigh it.
What a match is, and is not
A match records that an action addresses the subject of a proposal. It is not a claim that the document caused the action. Where the correspondence is inexact the entry says so and says how. Several actions recorded here address a proposal's subject by a route the document did not propose, and that distinction is the point.
Where a reading is contested, both readings are recorded and neither is resolved.
Plain English
The plain English rendering is a rewrite for readers who are not going to read an 887-page policy volume. It is not the document's words, and it is always shown beside the verbatim quotation rather than in place of it.
The reading level is measured, not asserted: every rendering is scored with the Flesch–Kincaid grade formula when the site is built, and the build fails if one drifts above a fifth-grade level. That formula measures sentence and word length. It cannot tell whether a sentence is clear, only whether it is short and plainly worded, so it is used as a floor and not as proof.
The chapter list
Chapter openings were read from the body text and checked against the book's own table of contents. Every start page agreed. Page numbers are the printed page numbers, derived from the page markers in the extraction, not counted from the start of the PDF.
What this leaves out
- 28 of 30 chapters are indexed. The rest are listed but not yet broken into proposals, and an unindexed chapter shows nothing.
- Background narrative and historical argument are not indexed as proposals.
- Agency rulemaking, litigation, appointments and budget actions are not yet tracked. An empty record under a proposal is not evidence that nothing has happened.
- The absence of a match says nothing about whether an action survived review in court.
How much is quoted
The site never reproduces a document. It quotes the sentence that carries a proposal, cites the page, and links to the publisher's own copy. Because the risk of over-quoting is cumulative rather than per-page, the proportion is measured when the site is built and the build fails if it drifts: no single excerpt may exceed 90 words, no chapter may be more than 5 per cent quoted, and the total across the work may not exceed 5 per cent.
As built, this site quotes 5573 words of a work of about 334,527, or 1.67 per cent.
- Chapter 1: 256 words quoted of about 8,143 (3.1% of the chapter)
- Chapter 2: 460 words quoted of about 10,840 (4.2% of the chapter)
- Chapter 3: 289 words quoted of about 7,540 (3.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 4: 296 words quoted of about 13,819 (2.1% of the chapter)
- Chapter 5: 407 words quoted of about 13,981 (2.9% of the chapter)
- Chapter 6: 251 words quoted of about 11,726 (2.1% of the chapter)
- Chapter 7: 257 words quoted of about 14,222 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 8: 117 words quoted of about 6,433 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 9: 202 words quoted of about 11,808 (1.7% of the chapter)
- Chapter 10: 180 words quoted of about 12,450 (1.4% of the chapter)
- Chapter 11: 262 words quoted of about 14,826 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 12: 173 words quoted of about 19,252 (0.9% of the chapter)
- Chapter 13: 201 words quoted of about 10,944 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 14: 266 words quoted of about 21,651 (1.2% of the chapter)
- Chapter 15: 116 words quoted of about 6,314 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 16: 136 words quoted of about 11,425 (1.2% of the chapter)
- Chapter 17: 162 words quoted of about 14,458 (1.1% of the chapter)
- Chapter 18: 244 words quoted of about 13,661 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 19: 135 words quoted of about 8,677 (1.6% of the chapter)
- Chapter 20: 92 words quoted of about 5,029 (1.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 21: 193 words quoted of about 9,953 (1.9% of the chapter)
- Chapter 22: 220 words quoted of about 10,295 (2.1% of the chapter)
- Chapter 23: 82 words quoted of about 5,457 (1.5% of the chapter)
- Chapter 24: 73 words quoted of about 5,493 (1.3% of the chapter)
- Chapter 25: 114 words quoted of about 7,801 (1.5% of the chapter)
- Chapter 26: 182 words quoted of about 21,867 (0.8% of the chapter)
- Chapter 27: 114 words quoted of about 5,688 (2.0% of the chapter)
- Chapter 28: 93 words quoted of about 5,992 (1.6% of the chapter)
Quotations remain the copyright of their publishers and are reproduced here for reference and commentary. Each links to the original so a reader can check it in context, which is the whole point of the exercise.
Copyright
This site indexes and cites; it does not republish the documents it indexes. Where a document is itself a public record, and every executive order in the tracker is a work of the United States government and in the public domain, it is linked and quoted freely. Where it is not, the site quotes only what reference requires and sends the reader to the publisher's copy.
Corrections
The data is kept as flat files in version control, so the history of every sentence is public: what changed, and when. A correction is a change to that record, not a silent edit.