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.
A paper's words are checked by a computer against the paper itself, in the place named for them. If they are not there, the site does not go up.
A thing the government did comes with a date and a record, taken straight from the government's own files. None of it is typed in from memory.
Plain words are checked by a computer for how hard they are to read. If they are too hard, they get written again.
Not everything is covered yet. The gaps are named where they fall.
Three Kinds of Statement
What the document says. The document's own words, exactly as printed, with the page or section they appear in and a link straight to it in the publisher's own copy. We check every quotation against the document before publishing. If one does not appear where it cites, the site will not go out, so a misquotation cannot slip through by mistake.
What has happened. Executive orders and other actions, each with its date, its Federal Register citation and a link. We take these straight from the Federal Register's own records and check every citation on the site against them before publishing. If one disagrees, the site will not publish. We never type a citation from memory.
What people say about either. Attributed to whoever said it, and never written in the site's own voice.
The Document's Own Word for Force
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. So every proposal shows you the document's own word for it, quoted, and you can weigh it yourself.
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.
Where a reading is contested, both readings are recorded and neither is resolved.
Plain English
The plain English version 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 document's own words rather than in place of them.
The reading level is measured rather than claimed. Every plain English version is scored before publishing, and if one drifts above a fifth-grade level the site will not go out until it is rewritten. 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.
What This Leaves Out
- Breadth, not completeness. A chapter or section being indexed does not mean every recommendation in it is recorded. The longer chapters make far more requests than are indexed here. Every document page says what was taken from it and what was not, which is where to look rather than here.
- Background narrative and historical argument are not indexed as proposals.
- An empty record under a proposal is not evidence that nothing has happened. Some proposals have been read against the record and nothing found, and those say so and give the date; the rest have not been read yet.
- Court cases naming an order are held as docket entries without the text of the filings, so nothing here rests on reading one.
- The absence of a match says nothing about whether an action survived review in court.
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.
Checking It Against the Record
The record behind these pages is published with the coverage it states about itself and a stable address to fetch it from. Anyone who wants to count something these pages do not count, or to check a figure against