About Congress Watch

This is an experimental project with the goal of asking "what if everyone could have staffers to help explain legislation?"

It fetches a bill from Congress.gov, runs it through an ingestion process to generate short shareable summaries, a more comprehensive summary, and a collection of contextual questions and answers. These are driven by LLMs, there may be errors or outright lies. However, testing has shown it to be mostly accurate. Investigation is ongoing on how to improve trust in the generated summaries.

This is a one person show - built, funded, and maintained by me in my free time.

FAQ

By which I mean questions I pre-emptively think may come up...

Is it Open Source

No. At some point I'd like to find a path to monetize this effort.

Does it cost anything?

For users the basic functionality, reading bill summaries and Q&A, will remain free as long as I can cover the hosting costs (they aren't significant, but they aren't nothing either)

Additional features may have fees in the future though. I would aim this at things that would appeal more to businesses, things like access to an API or notifications when bills about certain things happen seem most likely. But at the current moment nothing is planned.

Who built it/How was it built?

Under the hood, this is a bit of orchestration of LLM calls, some NLP, some linear algebra, and then a very standard hypermedia driven website hosted on a VPS.

The tools used:

  • GoLang - I just like it, the story for interacting with current ML tooling is less great though
  • SQLite - Simple data store
  • NATS - For event bus, mostly used on the admin panel but you may see more user facing features with it in the future
  • Datastar - For a site that is largely displaying semi static text with a minimum user interactivity it seemed like a solid fit
My goal was to build a simple, fast application that people can use on their mobile devices. I didn't feel like tools like React bought me much value for their cost.

As for who, my name is Schreiber, I think this is where I put Ex-Google, Ex-Square and all that, whch is true, but end of the day this is just me building something I think might be useful. If you're really interested in chatting, LinkedIn exists and that's probably the best place to reach me.

What about chatting with bills?

Ok, so remember the part where I said I cover the costs of this personally? (I think the startup speak is "pre-revenue") I'm willing to handle that risk because the LLM costs associated with it scale not with users but with bills written by Congress. I can always just ingest fewer bills to reduce costs or switch to processing batches at higher latencies. I can't do that with chats, those scale with usage.

So as a stopgap until I find a better solution, because I do believe being able to ask questions is a good tool for exploration, I've built out a feature that allows you to use a locally running LLM to chat with a bill. Right there in the browser you're running a scaled down version of how I handle answering the questions. Right now it requires WebGPU support for your browser, but I'm working on figuring out a way to support mobile or even browsers that don't support WebGPU yet. Definitely pushing the limits of what browsers are able to do here so it is a bit of an experiment.

I have a suggestion?

That's really stretching the definition of a question isn't it? Ok, best way is to contact me on LinkedIn and we can chat.

Unless you're trying to sell me some product, then remember my OpEx budget is actually negative... So I guess if you're trying to sell giving me an OpEx budget I'd love to chat.

How can I help?

Currently, I don't have a path for that, if you're interested, reach out on LinkedIn we'll see if we can come up with something.

Seriously, LinkedIn?

Yeah, I used to be fairly active on Twitter but, well, yeah. And that habit took me 3 years to break so while I do have a Bluesky account I regularly forget it exists for months at a time. And I don't want to put my personal email address on a webpage - I already get enough spam.

Maybe if there's interest I can set up, idk, Patreon or Discord or something, but ironically I'm more or less a social media luddite and I'd have to figure those things out.

Seriously, I'm hand rolling the HTML to this, I'm not even using markdown.

Have you received any legal threats?

Not at this time