How Civvie works

You ask a question in your own words. The AI reads it to figure out the topic and what timeframe you have in mind (like 'this year' or 'since 2024'). If you don't say, Civvie uses a default and tells you what range the answer covers.

Your ZIP tells Civvie which two senators and one House representative serve you. If your ZIP crosses district lines, Civvie asks for your full address to pinpoint the right district. That's the only thing either is used for.

Civvie covers bills, votes, and executive actions from the 118th and 119th Congresses (January 2023 to today). Official vote records reach further back, and we plan to extend coverage over time — we started with the two most recent Congresses so every bill gets the same complete treatment. A few older landmark laws, like the Inflation Reduction Act, are included too. Everything comes from official sources: Congress.gov and GovInfo for bills and votes; the Federal Register for executive actions; the CBO for what a bill costs; and the JCT for who pays more or less in taxes by income bracket.

One rule, same for every topic: if your rep voted on it on the House or Senate floor, it's in. Two things are left out: bills no one in your delegation voted on (no position to show), and housekeeping resolutions Congress uses to set its own rules (they have no legal effect). A recorded vote is the starting point because Civvie's whole question is ‘how did your rep vote on this.’ For the fuller picture (how far each bill got, how much detail it earns, and why we never pick by importance), see the Methodology.

Before anyone asks a question, Civvie processes every bill, CBO score, and JCTanalysis with an AI step that turns dense official documents into something a layperson can read. For each bill, that produces a plain-language description, a headline, a short story of how the vote played out, and the tradeoffs at stake. For CBO and JCT publications, it produces a structured digest: the bottom line, who pays, who benefits, and what the estimate leaves out. Every piece of this is written from the official source document and stored, so the AI doesn't redo this work on each question, and every claim stays traceable back to where it came from.

For each bill in the corpus, Civvie figures out where your rep stood by looking at what they did: writing it (sponsor), signing onto it (cosponsor), voting to end debate (cloture), or voting yes or no on the final version. Sometimes a procedural vote is what really decided the outcome, so Civvie counts that too. The logic lives in code, not in the AI's head. Same actions, same answer every time. When the House or Senate passes something by “voice vote” or “unanimous consent,” there's no record of individual votes; those show up as a chamber-level note instead of a rep position.

When you ask a question, Civvie searches the corpus for bills that match, combining meaning-based search (‘this bill is about the same thing you asked about’) with keyword matching. It leans on the nonpartisan summaries written by the Congressional Research Service, since those are written to describe what a bill actually does. The opening of each bill, the section where Congress lays out its reasoning, is always included so context doesn't get dropped.

On the spot, the AI writes one new thing: a short summary that ties the matching bills and executive actions back to your question. Everything else on the page (bill descriptions, tradeoffs, vote counts, sponsor names, your rep's positions, CBO and JCT digests, citations) was prepared ahead of time or pulled straight from the official records. The AI can't invent a vote, a sponsor, a date, or a number.

Every time the AI writes about how a rep voted (both in the bill prose prepared ahead of time and in the live summary written when you ask), Civvie automatically checks each claim against the official vote record. If a mismatch shows up during prep, the bill is regenerated until it matches. If a mismatch slips into your live summary, it's flagged inline instead of being shown as fact. And if the AI was unsure to begin with, that uncertainty is shown to you, never hidden.

A short answer at the top, then the bills and executive actions behind it. Each bill shows what it does, who voted how, and a ‘tradeoffs’ layer so you see what was actually in the bill, not just a yes or no. Tax bills include income-bracket figures from the JCT where available. Every claim links back to its official source.