Where every number comes from.

Why we source direct, not through an aggregator

PolicySpan pulls straight from each government's own disclosure system. No third-party aggregator sits anywhere in the pipeline, and that is exactly what lets us give you the fullest, most flexible analysis, answerable to nothing but the public record itself.

Buying a vendor's pre-packaged copy of the data quietly caps what the analysis can do. Sourcing direct removes those caps. Seven of them:

• The full record, not a flattened one. We read the government's raw filing, so we keep every field an aggregator drops or simplifies on the way through.
• Complete coverage. We take everything the source discloses, not the slice a vendor decided was worth carrying.
• Room for records that live in only one place. A national tool forces every state into one schema, and whatever does not fit falls out. State-native records, like Oregon's pre-bill Legislative Concept drafts, survive here because we never flatten them into a common mold.
• Freshness on the government's clock. We update when the source updates, not on a vendor's refresh cycle stacked on top of it.
• Connections we compute ourselves. The links between money, bills, and votes are built from the raw records, not inherited from a middle layer that may never have drawn them.
• Every number is checkable. Each figure traces back to the official system, so anyone can follow it to the source and confirm it. Your trust never has to route through a copy we are asking you to take on faith.
• No middleman to be exposed to. When an aggregator raises its price, rewrites its terms, gets acquired, or loses access to a source, its customers inherit the shock. A direct pipeline carries none of that dependency.

The result is analysis that is more complete, more flexible, and beholden to no one but the public record.

Data coverage

What we cover today, and the official system each layer comes from. Depth varies by jurisdiction; each detail page lists the exact record types and how far back they go.

By jurisdiction, and the evidence layer

Each page names the primary source and the official access point, so any figure can be checked independently. The research and statistics page covers the evidence layer that sits beside the bill record in every jurisdiction.

Every figure on PolicySpan traces to a public government source you can check yourself. For how scores and signals are built on top of these sources, see Methodology. Questions about a specific figure or its source? Reach out at rj@policyspan.ai.