Civic
Bills, votes, court decisions, and crime statistics are all public record. Finding them requires knowing which agency publishes what and how to navigate systems built for professionals.
NewsOnScale Staff
May 8, 2026
The federal government publishes an enormous amount of data. Congressional voting records, bill text, federal court decisions, FBI crime statistics, regulatory filings, and budget documents are all legally required to be publicly available.
The systems built to fulfill these requirements were designed primarily for professional researchers, journalists, lawyers, and government contractors. They were not designed for ordinary citizens who want to know how their representative voted on a specific bill.
## The discovery problem
Finding federal data requires knowing which agency publishes what, in what format, and through which portal. Congressional voting records live on one system. Bill text lives on another. Federal court decisions are distributed across individual court websites.
A citizen who wants to research a specific policy area faces a discovery problem before they face an analysis problem.
## What changes when data is accessible
When federal data is aggregated, normalized, and made searchable through a single interface, the barrier to civic participation drops significantly. FedPurse aggregates federal data across Bills, Votes, Courts, and Crime into a single searchable platform. The underlying data is unchanged. The barrier to accessing it is substantially reduced.