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Posted by foxfoxx 4 hours ago

Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts(govbase.com)
Govbase tracks every bill, executive order, and federal regulation from official sources (Congress.gov, Federal Register, White House). An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group.

It also ties each policy directly to bias-rated news coverage and politician social posts on X, Bluesky, and Truth Social. You can follow a single bill from the official text to how media frames it to what your representatives are saying about it.

Free on web, iOS, and Android.

https://govbase.com

I'd love feedback from the community, especially on the data pipeline or what policy areas/features you feel are missing.

120 points | 59 comments
foxfoxx 2 hours ago|
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.

waterproof 1 hour ago||
Love the idea. Thoughts from a UI/UX point of view, on mobile:

* Focus on the policy stuff since that's your differentiator. Put it front and center, currently it's below the "trending news". Nobody needs another trending news feed. I'd cut it entirely.

* Make your differentiator hyper-obvious at a glance on the front page. Right now your above-the-fold is dominated by a wall of AI generated text. It should include a tagline for your site and visuals that people won't get elsewhere.

* Your UI screams "vibe coded" which does not build confidence. Look to other authoritative sites for visual cues - consider a serif for headlines, make your spacing more thoughtful and consistent, reduce or remove your border radius.

foxfoxx 46 minutes ago||
Thanks! I'll look into these UX/UI ideas. As for the news, it's front and center because I want Govbase to be a site/app people regularly visit and policy does move slow. Even when a bill is introduced it can take weeks for the actual text content of the bill to show up on congress.gov. Plus on weekends/recess the government doesn't move.

I am planning to bring out more of the impact highlights from the policies to see what's "trending" or what certain reps are working on but just plans for now.

gwerbin 4 minutes ago||
Why chase engagement? If policy is slow-moving then people can visit weekly. Or make an RSS feed. Unless you're planning to go ad monetized or worse...
healsdata 3 hours ago||
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.

benzible 3 hours ago||
And the legality of it as well.
foxfoxx 3 hours ago|||
I agree and will be taking this feedback seriously. Daily briefings need more refinement since that is the first thing a user reads.
1shooner 2 hours ago||
How are the consequences of war not germane to its necessity?
stonogo 55 minutes ago||
They are, of course, but there are two different consequences involved in this assessment. One is "stop nuclear weapons" (the converse would be "do not stop nuclear weapons") and the other is "friendly fire incidents" (the converse would be "no friendly fire incidents"). Neither are directly related to the other, since the former is specific to this engagement and the latter happens in any combat.
scronkfinkle 1 hour ago||
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.

foxfoxx 43 minutes ago|
Yes! If you go to the engage tab you can look up some reps and the policies they're sponsoring but I plan on giving impact scores and where certain reps are focusing their time in the future.
tangotaylor 3 hours ago||
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.
foxfoxx 3 hours ago||
Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government transparency so people know how their representatives are spending their time and who they're actually working for.
LPisGood 2 hours ago||
This works great for international geo-politcs as well. It’s much more important to watch what leaders do than listen to what they say.
petcat 4 hours ago||
> 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.

schreiaj 3 hours ago||
As someone who has been working on this space for a while (not affiliated with govbase) this is really hard. Between eliminating the sycophancy that seems baked into LLMs and dealing with generalized hallucinations - it's freaking hard. I spent this weekend trying to figure out how to get my system to stop telling me the SAVE Act would be fine because it doesn't say what the process for if birth certificate doesn't match current id.

No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial agent to see if that can spot gaps.

foxfoxx 4 hours ago||
Very true. We're constantly trying to refine this and eventually plan on hiring policy researchers for a human in the loop but we just don't have the funding for that currently. We are trying to be transparent for how our scoring does work which you can read more about here: https://govbase.com/methodology

The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that ignores the larger context of where that option even came from and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly trying to optimize to get the larger picture.

lunatuna 1 hour ago||
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

some_random 1 hour ago||
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.
mellosouls 4 hours ago||
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.

sourcegrift 3 hours ago||
Sad news is that bluesky is on a decline while truth social is increasing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-...

I wonder what will happen to trans kids in the coming years. Trans people shape the soul of the country (since the last 3 years)

verdverm 3 hours ago|||
It doesn't look like truth social has grown much the last year, sits around 10% of bluesky by active user count. Would be interesting to see more detailed metrics about the amount of content and engagement.

Transgender has been a part of humanity forever, just like we see in other areas of nature. Here's some history going back 150+ years: https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-tra...

Zine: https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-liv...

Some perspective, if you have an ARM CPU, it's thanks to Sophia Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

wizzwizz4 47 minutes ago||
And if you have a CPU at all, it's thanks in part to Lynn Conway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

I expect it's worth looking into the ActivityPub Fediverse, or the applicable IndieWeb protocols (e.g. the linkback quartet: refback, trackback, pingback, and Webmention), to measure what people are saying. None of these have global feeds, though, so you have to deal with the conceptual complexity of measurement. (You have to deal with this anyway with Twitter, because of bot activity, but it's easier to deal with "this is an upper bound" than "this estimate may be too high or too low, and we'd have to investigate further in order to find out which".)

oceanplexian 2 hours ago|||
Why does Forbes post intentionally misleading charts?

The one for Bluesky goes from 9M DAU -> 3.5M DAU

The one for X goes from 149M DAU -> 128M DAU

Yet, the Y axis of both charts are wildly out of proportion to make it look like they are equivalent, which is also implied by the headline but clearly not true.

MarkusQ 1 hour ago||
Also, neither is zero based, making a 60% drop (bluesky) and a 15% drop (x) look comparable.
foxfoxx 4 hours ago||
Thanks for the feedback! We mainly include Truth social since Trump and a few of his closest administration are active on there and a large goal of Govbase is to follow the story from Trump posting about tariffs, the news reacting, the EO happening, etc.

I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However, most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active on X than Bluesky.

tangotaylor 3 hours ago||
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).
foxfoxx 3 hours ago|
Thanks! This actually started as a mobile app. I hope you check that out too!
cyrusradfar 2 hours ago|
Curious about the X/social feature, technically. How are you getting the data? Is it via official APIs or scraping
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