We introduced a plethora of new features in 2024, check them out below!
To review our updates month by month, check out our release notes, or sign up for our monthly newsletter. And for a checklist of actions to prepare your account for the upcoming legislative session(s), check out this blog post.
AI Generated Bill Summaries
To make it easier to quickly understand legislation, we have used an AI tool to summarize all bills, including bills from historical sessions in our database. The AI has looked at the title, state provided summary and bill text to produce a short, simple, plain English summary.
Resolutions and memorials have not been summarized. All new bills will get a summary as they are introduced, and the summary will be recreated for each new version of the bill.
The AI summaries are available on bill pages but also as a column option for bill sheets. They have been included in the Default Standard bill sheet template for any accounts created from April 2024 and later. If you have an account created earlier than that, then you can change the columns in your template by going to the Bill Sheet Templates menu. See this post for how to create and edit templates.
Each summary has a Report AI Issue link, which you can use to report any summaries which you think are inaccurate. Please do report any problems, we want the summaries to be as accurate as possible.
In accordance with BillTrack50's mission to make democracy more democratic by helping people participate in the legislative process, we have made the AI generated summaries available for everybody who views a bill page - you don't have to have a paid subscription or even a free account.
Discover Similar Bills
On bill pages there is a now a new tab called Similar Bills. When you click on this tab an AI tool will generate a list of bills that are similar to the bill you are looking at:
The tab looks similar to a bill sheet, with a standard set of columns. A few things to note:
- The list of bills looks and functions like a bill sheet. You can change the column widths, move them around, sort and filter them, and so on in exactly the same was as you can with a bill sheet.
- The bills will be from different states around the country. To just see bills from a particular state, use the filter on the State column. Here's how to filter a column.
- One of the columns is our AI-generated Summary, to allow you to quickly and easily check if the bills are relevant for you.
- The final column is called Score. It is an assessment, by the AI, of how similar the suggested bill is to the main bill. A top score of 100 would be a perfect match, though anything above about 75 should be a good fit. The results are sorted by Score in descending order, so the best matches will be at the top.
- There are 100 suggested similar bills. It's unlikely that all 100 will be good matches but we provide them for you to check. By scanning down the list of bills you should be able to see when the bills stop being useful.
- The list of similar bills is re-generated every time the tab on the bill is opened, so it always works from the current bill text and draws from the current list of introduced bills. Refreshing the web page will re-generate the list.
- Similar bills are available for bills going back to 2017, and we will be doing it for bills going forward. There are no similar bill suggestions or summaries for resolutions or memorials.
Recommended Bills Feature
The recommended bills feature complements AI summaries on bill pages and in bill sheets and our similar bills feature. Recommended bills does much the same thing as similar bills, but instead of a single bill, it shows you bills that are similar to all the bills in your bill sheet.
To use the feature, simply open any of your bill sheets and look for the magic wand Similar button at the bottom:
Click the button, and after a few seconds as the AI works its magic you will see a new tab on your bill sheet called Similar. This tab will contain a new grid with 100 new bills that the AI has deemed similar to the bills that are in your bill sheet.
Just like similar bills on bill pages, the list is sorted by relevance, with the bills that the AI thinks are most relevant to you at the top. The final Score column shows you how confident the AI is that the bills are relevant, with a score above about 75 being a reasonable match. You can now click the + symbol to the left of any bill to add it to the bill sheet (or in fact any other bill sheet you have created).
Help Center
This year we launched a brand new Help Center. It features dozens of helpful posts and videos explaining every aspect of how to use BillTrack50. Just go to https://www.billtrack50.com/help/ and use the search function to find relevant guides.
Committee Categories
You've always been able to search by committee to find bills assigned to a specific committee, but now you can filter your searches to specific types of bills based on the category of committee they have been assigned to.
We have looked at all the committees across the whole of the country and assigned them one of 11 broad categories:
- Justice
- Government Affairs
- Education
- Agriculture and Natural Resources
- Business and Industry
- Labor and Employment
- Military Affairs and Security
- Budget and Finance
- Health and Social Services
- Transportation and Infrastructure
- Housing and Urban Affairs
So, for example, the House Congressional Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Committee is in the Agriculture and Natural Resources category (which covers environmental, farming, mining and so on). The Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee in in the Government Affairs category (which includes anything to do with elections, interstate relations, local governance, administration and so on).
Go to the Filter Bills section of the Query tab on any bill sheet, and check a box next to any relevant categories:
The search will now just return bills that both meet your query and have been assigned to a committee within that category.
Improvements to State Stats
To complement the introduction of committee categories, we've crunched the data to produce new graphs on our state stats pages. The charts help you determine the likelihood of a particular bill passing:
This graph shows what percentage of bills referred to different categories of committees were enacted over time. This lets you estimate the likelihood of your bill passing based on it's topic. For the graph above for California, in 2019 an education bill had a 24% chance of passing while a military affairs and security bill had a 42% chance of success.
Improvements to Regulation Tracking
First, we've been working on completing our coverage, and now are only missing one state, NJ, which we hope to have soon. Our other big goal is to create individual documents for each individual regulation, and no longer display the regs as part of a larger document (like for some states) or on a page with maybe the end of the previous reg or beginning of the next reg (like for the Federal Register). We have made great strides towards that goal this year, with only 17 states left to complete. As we've been switching over to individual reg documents you have hopefully also noticed that we have been adding information to the regulation title, usually including reg type and agency, among other information.
Our goal in 2025 is to complete this work which would allow us to include the extra information, like reg type and agency, as both columns in the regulation sheet and as options to filter by on the query tab. We will also take a shot at running the regs through AI to get an AI generated summary, although those results are as yet uncertain.
We are not yet tackling tying the life of a reg together like we have for bills where you can follow a regulation from proposed to final. But hopefully the new meta information will get us a long way towards that ultimate dream.