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Leg Tech
Create an inflation calculator for Google sheets drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics (or another source) to calculate inflation. As inputs you should be able to assign a particular row or column as indicating the starting comparison date (as a year) and a finishing comparison date (as a year). To make this work you should be able to drag down the row to automatically inflate all the elements in that row.
The formula should be something like =(source monetary amount cell, original year to be inflated cell, final year to be inflated cell)
Create a bookmarklet on firefox that automatically generates an index for a Github wiki page.
When a button on Firefox is pressed, it should create a new google document in a pre-set folder. A window should pop up prompting for the name of the person being met with. The new file should be named in the format of date and the person's name -- e.g.: 2025-01-15 Jane Smith. The new Google doc should be opened with the person's name centered in the first row, the date centered in the second row, and the cursor left aligned on the fourth row.
I've already built the script but I can't get it to deploy permanently on firefox.
Congress does a poor job of publishing relevant information about hearings in one place.
Step 1 is to create a spreadsheet that pulls in the following data:
- Hearing date
- Whether it's a hearing or markup
- The title of the proceeding (probably separate column for event ID)
- The name of the committee of jurisdiction (probably separate column for unique ID of the committee)
- Whether it is a full committee or subcommittee proceeding
- The webpage for the proceeding from the committee
- The webpage for the proceeding from docs.house.gov (if it's the House) // Senate info comes from the senate committee info page
- Where the video is available (youtube or akami)
- Where you can find the transcript
This is regularly updated as new information is added on: Congress.gov, docs.house.gov, the relevant committee youtube page, the relevant committee webpage
Also note that committees often forget to put the event ID in the YouTube page, so you'll have to do fuzzy logic to match some of the committee proceeding video names with the official committee proceeding name available on the House or Senate committee pages (or via the Congress.gov API)
Step 2 is to update a Wiki page (like this one) to publish the information as prose and update the hyperlinks as appropriate.
Step 3 may be to provide notice to the user when new information regarding a relevant committee of jurisdiction is published.
I care particularly for House Admin and Senate Rules.
As mentioned in Unified Hearing & Markup Data, committees do not always do a good job of putting the event ID on Youtube videos.
The purpose is to either encourage committees to put event IDs in their video descriptions on youtube or alert committees when they've failed to do so.
We should track all the various committee youtube videos and crosscheck them against official event id information either from congress.gov (API?) or docs.house.gov.
There should be a dashboard that lists all committee names. Under each committee it should indicate how many proceedings the committee has held and whether the youtube video includes the event ID. (If it does not, the video won't show up on congress.gov). We can match the existence of the videos by looking at the date of the video and its title and fuzzy match against official notice of hearings from the committee. Probably should look at video length to make sure it's the full proceeding.
You then want the dashboard that does a few thing
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Ranks committee consistency of putting event ids on videos. Committees with the highest consistency get a good grade, those with low consistency get a bad grade.
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Also consider a feature where once a week the committee is emailed with a list of videos that don't have event IDs, with a link to the youtube page for the video and the event ID they should include.
GAO reports are often topically relevant to committee hearings. For upcoming (and past hearings), identify which GAO reports are likely to be most relevant to that hearing and identify and link to those reports. Perhaps clean up GAO's summary and share that as well.
The House and (to a lesser extent the) Senate publish information about upcoming floor schedules. Take that data and infuse it into the already existing committee schedule trackers on congress.gov and possibly govtrack.us.
Turn the week's committee schedule into an ical file.
Committees have proceedings all the time. If you want a transcript you have to wait a year or more from Congress or pay for a private service. Use appropriate tools to create an immediate transcript of the committee proceedings and make them available at a static website.
Further consider creating an automatic summary of what as discussed.
Consider also publishing as an EPUB.
Also consider connecting the automatic transcripts to Unified Hearing & Markup Data.
Create a database of all witnesses in the House and Senate. Give a unique ID to each witness and track identify all the proceedings on which they've testified. Include a transcript of their written remarks, their written testimony, and summaries of both.
Also, they likely were asked Questions for the Record that would show up in a committee transcript. Pull that information as well.
don't just track by the witness, but also by the title. For example, "Jane Smith" or "FAA Administrator"
It's important to track information about upcoming appropriations proceedings and congress.gov doesn't do this well. The information is generally posted once a week on the house and senate approps committee pages as well as on the 12 subcommittee pages. Information to gather:
- What are the instructions for public witnesses?
- What are the instructions for member offices submitting testimony?
- What's the due date for the public to submit written testimony?
- What's the due date fro the public to request to testify in person?
- What's the date of the public witness testimony?
- What's the date for member offices to request to testify?
- What's the date when written testimony for members is due?
- What's the date members testify in person?
- To whom should this information be communicated?
This information should be added to a spreadsheet. I have a model for what this looks like.
It's a pain to submit bill text or committee report items to individual member offices, especially when you've got a lot. Their submission templates are google forms that are similar but not the same.
Make it possible to crosswalk a spreadsheet that you've already generated to an individual office's forms. Then have it autofill that form. This will allow the submission of multiple recs for an office without having to do it by hand. And to take the relevant recs and submit to other offices without updating the spreadsheet.
Also make it possible to transform a google doc into the spreadsheet.
Appropriators routinely publish bill text and committee reports on their committee websites and it can take a long time for that information to make its way onto congress.gov.
Create a spreadsheet that contains
- The bill text as introduced in subcommittee
- the bill text as reported by subcommittee
- The press release summarizing the committee action
- A link to any amendments offered and adopted at subcommittee
- The bill text as published prior to consideration by the full committee
- The report language as published prior to consideration by full committee
- the bill text as adopted by the full committee
- Any amendments offered, whether adopted, by the committee
- The report language as adopted by the full committee
- In the House, the bill text prior to consideration by the house rules committee
- In the House, the report text prior to consideration by the house rules committee
- In the House, the bill text after consideration by the house rules committee *In the House, the bill text after consideration by the house rules committee
- the bill text adopted by the house
- the bill text adopted by the senate
- The joint explanatory statement that accompanies the final bill as adopted in either/both chambers
I have a spreadsheet that tracks this that we can use as an example
Other features
- It also is useful to know whether/ how bill text or report language has changed as the measure has moved in the chamber
- It is useful to know whether/how the bill text or report language is the same or different between the chambers
- It is helpful to know all the directions given to agencies/offices in the report language
- It is helpful to know when reports are due back from entities in the report language -- this would compile the house and senate and joint explanatory document. It would also look for conflicting language and identify it.
A hard but useful feature:
- Look at report language accompanying approps bills over time to pull together the same or similar sections and display them together. You can see how ideas have evolved over multiple congresses.
CRS.Congress.gov will soon publish some CRS reports as HTML, available by API. In addition, a technologist has built for me a tool to transform older CRS reports into HTML.
- Incorporate the newly available CRS reports as HTML onto everycrsreport.com
- Update the older CRS reports for which HTML is not available by running this tool.
The committee.report tool is also a clever way to solve some of this problem.
Ideally we'd want the reports in markdown so they can be transformed into multiple versions.
Transform them all into epub as well.
In addition, we may want to consider making the old CRS reports available for free or at as low a cost as possible on amazon.com to get rid of the shysters charging 20 bucks a copy.
Consider also using AI to identify the subject matter for the CRS reports and generate tags for the everycrsreport website.
GAO reports are published as PDFs. You should be able to read them as epub on your kindle or in whatever format you want.
Does this tool get us part of the way?
We want to host the GAO reports and publish them.
Wikipedia is the #1 source for policy information on the internet but it does not incorporate CRS reports as much as it is should.
Use AI and other technologies to help infuse the contents of CRS reports onto the relevant wikipedia pages to improve the quality of articles.
Use the pre-existing Sunlight Foundation/ ProPublica scraper tools and turn scanned statements of disbursements into spreadsheet data for House quarterly spending going back to 1980 or so. The old reports are available from the Boston Public Library, I think.
Using historical bill referral patterns, predict which bills will be referred to which committees. Make this available as a dataset or an add-on-app that runs on top of congress.gov or govtrack.us
Keep track of how long it takes congress.gov to create a summary for a bill for which it has published text.
Make it as a dashboard. Look at it several ways:
- count the total number of pages in the bills
- count by the number of bills
- look at the number of bills that have been reported by committee
Create a bsky feed / spreadsheet that lists all jobs on the hill
Clean and parse the data (probably using AI) from the House's employment PDF that comes out weekly Organize the data published by the Senate for its political and non-political entities Scrape the House website for support office job postings Troll USA JOBS for support offices and agencies, such as GAO, LC, CRS, USCP, AOC.
Keep track of when the items are first posted.
Pull in all the floor information from the House and Senate notices and all the committee schedule information from the committees.
Use AI to transform it into a newsletter (like this one) following the model:
- Here's what's on the House floor this week -- the bills up for a vote, the bills on suspension
- What's going on in the senate -- bills and noms -- maybe take this from the colloquoy?
- Here's what's happening in committees in each chamber. Look at total number of hearings/markups in each chamber by frequency of committee, highlighting appropriations and NDAA first, then major nominees
The Senate and sometimes the House pass a bunch of sneaky resolutions. Transform the alerts, with the text that's published in the congressional record but not always on congress.gov, into an email alert.
Create an alert for new requests for proposals -- i.e., contracts -- let by the House, Senate, and its support agencies. Tweet them out on bsky and maintain in a spreadsheet.
House committees report monthly their spending to the House Admin Committee. See here
Turn the PDF data into spreadsheets and visualize it.
The House and Senate pass individual resolutions to provide funding for committees. Find those resolutions for each congress, which follow a formula, and pull the data and stick it into a spreadsheet going back in time.
Look at the House and Senate appropriations tables published at the end of the approps committee reports, which show line item spending. Transform those into data tables that track spending by line item going back years.
Connect budget justifications with appropriations info committee report sections.