About our data

Every bill, vote, statement, meeting, and budget line on Agora is drawn directly from official government sources. We translate the record into plain language and add tools to respond to it, but we do not change the record itself, and we do not order it by what will hold your attention. An informed citizenry deserves the authentic record, not an algorithm's interpretation of it.

The sources, by level of government:

• Federal. Bills, sponsors, and votes from Congress.gov. Floor statements from the Congressional Record. Rules and public comment periods from the Federal Register. Spending from USAspending.gov.
• New York State. Bills, summaries and Senate votes from NY Open Legislation, the New York State Senate's public legislative data. Assembly committee assignments from the Assembly's own website, nyassembly.gov. Spending from the State's open data.
• New York City. Local laws and resolutions from the NYC Council's legislative record (Legistar). Spending from the City's published budget.
• Your representatives and districts. Official rosters and public district boundaries, matched to the address you enter once during sign-up using the US Census Bureau's public geocoder. That same lookup returns your census tract, which we keep. See Privacy for what it is and how it is used. The signed-out Who represents me? lookup uses the same geocoder and keeps nothing.

Each record keeps a link to read the original at its source. New York City bills also link to intro.nyc, an independent site that presents the same bills in a more readable form. It is labelled as such and is not an official source.

Where an official plain-language summary already exists, we show it and name the source on the page: the Congressional Research Service for federal bills, NY Open Legislation for state bills, and the NYC Council (Legistar) for local laws.

Many federal bills have no official summary yet. For those we publish a summary written with AI from the bill's own text, marked AI summary on the page. These describe what a bill would do in the bill's own terms. They do not characterize it, predict its chances, or take a side. They are written by a model from the bill text and are not individually reviewed by a person, which is why they carry a label. Where a bill's title is loaded, the summary describes the mechanism rather than repeating the framing.

An official summary always wins. Federal bills are checked again on a schedule, because the Congressional Research Service publishes its summaries weeks or months after a bill is introduced. When one appears, it replaces the AI summary on that bill's page.

Where we have neither an official summary nor a usable text, we show the record's own title and status and say that no summary is available. We never write our own opinion of a bill, and we never present an AI summary as an official one.

Your feed is ordered by what is recent and relevant to your districts, never by what will keep you scrolling. There is no engagement ranking, no trending, and no promoted content. Party is shown as plain text, never as a color, and we never score officials against one another. Officials see totals and constituency-weighted counts, never your identity or your activity.

Search ranks results by how closely they match what you typed. One rule changes that order. A New York Senate or Assembly resolution, the kind numbered with a J or a K, gets 30% of its usual relevance score, so it appears below other results that match your words equally well. Nearly all of these resolutions are ceremonial, such as a tribute or a request that the Governor proclaim an awareness week. The rule looks only at the resolution's number. It never looks at who sponsored it or at their party. If you search for a resolution by its number, it still comes first.

The parties do not file the same mix of bills and resolutions, so the rule affects them unevenly. On 24 September 2026, Agora held 12,873 New York Senate and Assembly bills and resolutions whose main sponsor is a Democrat; the rule applied to 2,224 of them (17.3%). Of the 4,896 whose main sponsor is a Republican, it applied to 1,656 (33.8%). It applied to 32 of the 513 whose main sponsor has another party or none on record. Party is the one on record for the main sponsor.

Results with the same relevance are shown newest first.

The record syncs regularly, and each item shows when it was last updated. Government moves on its own calendar: when a legislature is out of session, its lens is quieter, and we say so rather than manufacture activity.

Questions about where something came from can be sent to the Agora team. We will answer in plain language.