Research & statistics: the evidence a bill turns on.
Beside the bill record, PolicySpan keeps the published research and the official statistics a policy argument rests on: government research and audit reports as full text with their tables, the scholarly literature by catalog, and official statistical series down to the county and the city. Every item carries its publisher, date, license and exact source, so a finding is a quotation from a named document or a figure from a named table, never a summary of a summary.
PolicySpan is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the publishers or agencies named here. We name them because that is where the records live. Counts as of 2026-11-02; the corpus grows nightly.
Research is context published by others. It is never part of a bill's own record, and the product keeps the two apart: a document is attached to a bill as documented only when the document itself names the bill, as a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate or a Legislative Analyst's Office analysis does. Everything else is a topical match on the bill's subject and is labeled that way. For how direct sourcing shapes the rest of the product, see the Data & Sourcing overview.
What we hold
| Kind of record | What one record is | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | A published report or article: title, authors, venue, date, official URL, abstract or summary, the publisher's own topics and ours, license | 33,975 |
| Sections and tables | The document's full text split on its own headings, with page numbers for PDF sources, and its tables transcribed cell for cell with caption, units and Source line | 20,501 sections, 481 tables |
| Series and observations | An official statistical series with its computation stated in words, and every value tied to the exact source it came from | 53 series, 102,313 observations |
Government research and audit offices — full text and tables
What they are
Nonpartisan research and audit arms of the U.S. Congress and the California and Oregon state governments. Their reports are the written record legislators and committees work from, and most are public domain or public record.
What PolicySpan ingests
| Publisher | What we hold | License |
|---|---|---|
| Congressional Research Service | Every report in the catalog (23,594); summary, CRS topics and full text in sections for reports on a policy topic since 2016. Every federal issue: housing, health, energy, labor, immigration, defense, taxes | U.S. Government work, public domain |
| U.S. Government Accountability Office | New reports from GAO's feed: sections with page numbers and every captioned table transcribed. Federal programs across every issue | U.S. Government work, public domain |
| Congressional Budget Office | Cost estimates as documented links to the bills they score (summaries and links; the PDFs sit behind an access check) | U.S. Government work, public domain |
| California Legislative Analyst's Office | Publications with their tables, and documented links to the bills they name. The state budget and every spending area: housing, health, education, transportation, climate | California public record |
| California State Auditor | Audit reports: sections from the report, each table from its own PDF. State and local programs, whichever the Legislature asks about | California public record |
| Oregon Secretary of State, Audits Division | Audit reports from the state's open list: sections and tables from the PDFs. State agencies and programs across issues | Oregon public record |
Sourcing
Each publisher's own release channel: GAO's report feed and PDFs, the LAO and State Auditor report pages, the Oregon Audits Division's open records list, CBO's publication feed, and for CRS the EveryCRSReport archive of the official CRSReports.congress.gov releases. Tables are transcribed from the publisher's PDF cell for cell and checked against the page text; a table is marked verified only when every number in the grid was found on the page it came from.
Scholarly literature — by catalog
What it is
Peer-reviewed articles and reviews on the questions policy arguments turn on, about seventy-five across the topic taxonomy. Housing: supply elasticity, rent regulation, zoning reform, homelessness interventions. Health: Medicaid expansion, coverage and outcomes, overdose policy. Labor and economy: minimum wage employment effects, paid leave, gig work. Climate and energy, education, public safety, immigration, taxes and the rest follow the same pattern: the questions a committee analyst would ask, answered by the literature as published.
What PolicySpan ingests
| Publisher | What we hold | License |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAlex (catalog of scholarly works) | 9,941 articles and reviews since 2010; the catalog record, the abstract as published, DOI and open-access link. Where the journal withholds the abstract it is filled from Semantic Scholar and labeled as such | Catalog metadata CC0; abstracts as published; full text and tables stored only for papers under CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0 or public domain, with the version read on the record |
Sourcing
The OpenAlex catalog and the journals' own open-access copies. The paper stays with its journal; PolicySpan links to it by DOI and reads its text only where the license allows.
Official statistics — by issue
What they are
Series published by the federal statistical agencies and, where the state's own network is deeper than the federal one, by California and Oregon agencies. Each series states its computation in words, and every value carries the exact source it came from. Grouped here by the issue a bill would turn on; the same series are filterable by topic in the product and the API.
Housing
| Publisher | Series | Geography |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey | Renter and owner cost burden at 30% and 50% of income, median gross rent, median home value, renter share | Nation, states, California and Oregon counties |
| HUD (HUD USER) | CHAS cost burden by income band and tenure; Fair Market Rents, one and two bedroom | Nation, states, counties |
| FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) | Building permits, housing starts, house price index, rental and homeowner vacancy, mortgage rate, median new home price, shelter CPI, each with its original source named | Nation, every state |
| U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey | Housing units permitted and the multifamily share, 2010 to the latest year | Every permit-issuing city in California and Oregon, counties, states |
| California Department of Housing and Community Development | Progress against each jurisdiction's Regional Housing Needs Allocation, all incomes and lower income | All 539 California cities and counties, by planning cycle |
Water
| Publisher | Series | Geography |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Geological Survey Water Data | Depth to groundwater and its five-year change, streamflow as a percentile of each gage's record, wells with nitrate above the drinking-water limit | California and Oregon counties and states |
| California Department of Water Resources | The same measures from the state's own networks: DWR well levels (CASGEM and SGMA), CDEC gage flow | California counties and the state |
| California State Water Resources Control Board (GAMA) | Wells with nitrate above the limit, from the state's groundwater quality programs, public water system wells included | California counties and the state |
| Oregon Water Resources Department | The state's observation wells and gages, same measures | Oregon counties and the state |
| Oregon Department of Environmental Quality | Wells with nitrate above the limit, through the federal Water Quality Portal | Oregon counties and the state |
Health
| Publisher | Series | Geography |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey | Uninsured share of the population | Nation, states |
| Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services | Medicaid and CHIP enrollment, monthly | Nation, states |
| CDC National Center for Health Statistics | Drug overdose deaths, 12-month-ending count, monthly | Nation, states |
Economy and labor
| Publisher | Series | Geography |
|---|---|---|
| FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) | Unemployment rate, real median household income, per capita personal income, population, GDP, CPI all items | Nation, every state |
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | Average annual pay and covered employment, all industries (QCEW) | Nation, states |
Energy and transportation
| Publisher | Series | Geography |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Energy Information Administration | Average residential electricity price; renewable share of generation | Nation, states |
| U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics | Transit ridership, unlinked passenger trips, monthly | Nation |
Sourcing
Each agency's official data portal or API: the Census API, HUD USER, the FRED API, the USGS Water Data APIs, the California Natural Resources Agency and data.ca.gov open data portals, the California Data Exchange Center, the Oregon Water Resources Department's data services, the Water Quality Portal, and the Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey files. Ingested directly, no aggregator; FRED is itself the Federal Reserve's channel for series it names by original source.
Good to know
- A finding is a quotation. Sections are the publisher's text under the publisher's headings, with the page number for PDF sources. Nothing is paraphrased in storage, and Polly reports findings as the document states them, with publisher, year and venue.
- A table is the publisher's cells. Figures are quoted from verified tables only, and every table links to the PDF opened at that page. Nothing is computed, rounded or converted. Readers can report any table from the product; a report marks it unverified until checked.
- Water figures are network roll-ups, not a census. A county value is the median across the wells or gages a network monitors, and the number of sites travels with every figure, as does the list of sites behind the latest value. Where a state network and the federal network both cover a county, both are shown and named. Nitrate figures describe monitoring, study and public-supply wells, not every private well.
- Housing production is permits authorized, not units built. The unincorporated part of a county is its own row.
- Survey estimates carry no margins of error yet. ACS and CHAS figures are estimates for a period and are labeled as such.
- The literature is a sample, not a systematic review. It is chosen by evidence questions and searched by words; Polly says so when a question turns on it.
- Not loaded yet: HUD point-in-time homelessness counts and the LIHTC property file; CBO's full publications (access check); Oregon's own city housing production counts.
Every figure on this page traces to a named publisher or agency that can be checked independently. The same records are available through the API and the MCP server for customers with a key. Questions about a specific finding or its source? Reach out at rj@policyspan.ai.