Content guide

This is the editorial standard for every entry on whatdidgovtdofor.you. Human writers, research agents, and the automated pipeline (pipeline/) all write against it. The pipeline prompts embed this file verbatim, so changes here change what the models produce.

What the site is for

Most people never hear about the concrete things government does for them. Each entry takes one action (a law, an executive order, a rule, a budget item, a program, a local ordinance) and makes it legible in five seconds: what changed for real people, who made it happen, and whether it’s still in effect. Proof is always one tap away.

The voice is factual but compelling. We are not neutral about whether people should know these things; we are scrupulous about whether they are true. Nothing should be easy to dismiss as spin.

The site is nonpartisan, but it has a point of view: working people’s, not owners’. “Did government do something for you?” is asked on behalf of people who earn a wage, rent or carry a mortgage, ride the bus, send kids to public school, and rely on public services. Most policy is a win for some people and a cost to others. We judge it from where workers stand.

• Credit goes to whoever did the work, Republicans included. When Republicans deliver something good for working people, say so plainly. Never add or keep an entry to balance the parties. Balance is not a goal, and accuracy is.
• Party is shown next to every official’s name. Don’t editorialize about parties in the text.
• Never claim more than the sources support. Prefer a smaller true number to a bigger fuzzy one.

What qualifies

Include actions with a direct, tangible effect on working people’s lives: money in pockets, costs lowered, services created or protected, rights protected, infrastructure built, safety improved.

Leave out: commemorative resolutions, post-office namings, purely procedural votes, announcements of intent with no enacted action, and anything whose main effect is on government itself. A bill that only passed one chamber is not an entry. A proposal becomes an entry when it’s enacted, signed, funded, or ordered.

Count what it cost (the net-impact test)

An action qualifies only if working people come out ahead once you count how it was paid for. A benefit isn’t a win if the same action takes more away from the people it claims to help.

• Tax cuts are not automatically wins. Highways, buses, schools, health coverage, and food assistance are paid for with taxes. A tax cut that’s paid for by cutting those services hurts the people who depend on them, even if it puts a little money in their pockets.
• These pass: refunds or rebates from a real revenue surplus; tax relief where the lost revenue is replaced, so services aren’t cut (say how, e.g., “the state replaces the lost school funding”); and credits aimed at lower- and middle-income workers and families that aren’t paid for with service cuts.
• These fail: benefits carried in a law that, taken as a whole, cuts services or coverage for working people more than it gives them. Example: the tips and overtime deductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was paid for in large part by cutting Medicaid and SNAP. The sweetener doesn’t become its own entry. (When harms are added to the site, such a law appears there, with its sweeteners noted.)
• These fail: relief that mostly goes to owners and the wealthy, or that shifts costs onto workers. Examples: a property-tax rate cut paired with higher flat fees, or a cut whose benefits flow mainly to top earners or large property holders.
• When it’s a judgment call, say what it cost in the body (“The state replaced the lost revenue from its surplus”) and cite the source. If you can’t establish how it was paid for, it doesn’t qualify yet.
• Public housing redevelopment (demolish and rebuild, Choice Neighborhoods, RAD conversions) is out of scope while the site covers only wins. These projects can permanently remove homes from the lowest-income renters, and telling that honestly takes the harms side of the site.

Harms (“what government did to you”) are out of scope for v1. When a good thing has been rolled back, that goes in the entry’s status, not in a separate entry.

Fields

Entries are Markdown files in src/content/entries/{federal|state|local}/{slug}.md. The YAML frontmatter is validated by src/content.config.ts. The body is the “What it means for you” explainer.

title (≤ 90 chars, aim for ≤ 60)

The headline is the impact, in plain words, from the reader’s point of view: something a stranger gets at a glance. Use second person where it’s natural. Lead with the benefit, not the bill.

• Good: Insulin costs $35 a month if you're on Medicare
• Good: Every public school student in New York eats breakfast and lunch free
• Bad: Inflation Reduction Act signed into law (names the bill, not the impact)
• Bad: Historic investment transforms lives (vague, salesy)

Sentence case. No trailing period. No exclamation points.

dek (≤ 280 chars)

One or two sentences that complete the picture: what changed, for whom, since when. Concrete nouns and numbers.

level, jurisdiction, places

level is federal, state, or local. jurisdiction is the place id of the government that acted: us, ny, nyc, va, hampton-roads, norfolk, virginia-beach, chesapeake, portsmouth, suffolk, hampton, newport-news, williamsburg, poquoson, james-city-county, york-county, isle-of-wight, gloucester.

places (optional) lists other places where the action has a specific local footprint. A federal grant that built a Norfolk floodwall has jurisdiction: us and places: [norfolk]. That’s how someone looking up a Norfolk address finds it.

action

• type: law, executive-order, regulation, budget, program, ordinance, ballot-measure, settlement, or grant
• name: official name (“Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”, “Local Law 18 of 2024”)
• identifier: optional (“Pub. L. 117-169”, “H.R. 5376”, “HB 1”, “Int. 0360-2024”)
• date: the day it was enacted, signed, ordered, or approved (YYYY-MM-DD)
• effective: optional, when the benefit started or starts

topics (1–3)

health, costs, housing, childcare, education, work, transit, infrastructure, climate, storms, safety, rights, veterans, food, internet, voting, seniors

who_benefits

One sentence naming the people helped, with a count if the sources give one. “About 3.3 million people on Medicare who use insulin.”

impact (1–3 items)

The big numbers on the action’s cover. figure ≤ 18 chars ($35, 1.5 million, $2,000, 12 weeks). label ≤ 80 chars and says what the figure is. Every figure must appear in, or follow arithmetically from, a cited source.

status

• state: one of
  • in-effect: working now
  • delivered: a one-time benefit that was paid out or completed (a rebate check, a finished project). Not “ended”: nothing was taken away. Set action.effective to when it was delivered.
  • phasing-in: enacted and rolling out; not everyone has the benefit yet
  • under-threat: in effect, but a specific, active effort would end or gut it (a pending bill or rule, a lawsuit, a proposed budget cut). Name the effort.
  • repealed, expired, blocked (by a court), cancelled (funding or program terminated)
• as_of: the date you checked the status
• note: required for anything but in-effect and delivered. Say what happened, who did it, and when. “Repealed for vehicles bought after Sept. 30, 2025 by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by Donald Trump (R).”
• by: official ids responsible for the threat or rollback, if any
• source: URL backing the status claim (required unless the state is in-effect or delivered)

credit (1 or more)

The people (or bodies) who made it happen, each with a role: signed, sponsored, cosponsored, proposed, led, championed, negotiated, secured-funding, voted-yes, tie-breaker, issued, implemented

Credit goes to the people who did the work, in order of how much of it they did. List credits in that order; the first credit is the byline readers see.

1. First: the legislators who wrote, carried, or fought for it: the lead sponsors or chief patrons, and anyone a source names as its champion (often someone who pushed it for years before it passed) or as a lead negotiator. For a budget item, credit the legislators who won it in the budget, not just the leaders who passed the whole budget.
2. Executives come first only when the work was really theirs: they proposed it and pushed it through (a governor’s budget initiative, a mayor’s program), negotiated it, or issued it themselves (an executive order or a rule). Use proposed, negotiated, or issued and back it with a source. Running for office on the idea alone doesn’t count.
3. Last: signed. Signing is the step of not blocking something; it isn’t the work. Every entry that was signed lists the signer, and lists them last. An executive who also did the work gets that role instead of, not in addition to, signed.

Appointed officials (a cabinet secretary, an agency head, a city manager) get credit by name when a source ties them to the specific action, e.g. a transportation secretary who issued the refund rule, or a city manager who proposed the budget item. Elected officials who directed the work still come first. Give appointees the party they publicly belong to (most cabinet secretaries), or NP if they have none (most city managers and career officials).

People who hold no office can be credited when a source names them as championing the specific action, for example a First Lady or a named advocate who pushed it through. Use championed. List them after the officials who carried it but before the signer. Create their file with the office line describing who they are (office: First Lady of the United States), with current as appropriate.

At minimum, credit the lead sponsors (or, for an executive action, whoever issued it). An entry whose only credit is the signer isn’t finished: find out who carried it. Add others when a source names their role. Don’t list every yes vote here; that’s what votes is for. note is optional context (“Carried the bill for six sessions”, “Lead Senate negotiator”).

Each official is an id that must exist in src/content/officials/{id}.yaml. Create the file if it’s missing (see Officials below). A collective body like norfolk-city-council or nyc-rent-guidelines-board is a valid official with kind: body.

votes (optional, strongly encouraged for legislation)

One item per final-passage vote:

votes:
  - chamber: U.S. House
    date: 2022-08-12
    yes: 220
    no: 207
    by_party: { D: { yes: 220, no: 0 }, R: { yes: 0, no: 207 } }
    source: https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2022420

Use the official roll call (clerk.house.gov, senate.gov, LIS, nysenate.gov, legistar) as the source. Party breakdowns must match it exactly. For a small body like a city council, use members instead of (or as well as) by_party.

sources (1 or more; aim for 2–4)

Prefer primary sources: the law text, an agency page, the official roll call, a government press release. Add one reputable news or nonpartisan analysis source (CBO, KFF, CRS, Tax Policy Center, a major paper) when it helps a reader trust the numbers. Every number and status claim must trace to something here.

sources:
  - title: Medicare $35 insulin cap
    publisher: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
    url: https://...
    date: 2023-01-01

featured

true for a handful of entries per place that best show what the site is about. Use sparingly.

verification

verification:
  writer: { model: claude-opus-5-5, via: claude-code, date: 2026-11-05 }
  verdict: pending

Writers always set verdict: pending. The verifier, which is always a different model family, sets verifier, verdict (pass, corrected, or fail), and notes.

source_key (pipeline only)

A stable id for the underlying action (“us-law-117-169”, “va-2026-hb1”). The pipeline uses it to avoid duplicates and to honor retractions.

Body: “What it means for you”

Two to four short paragraphs, 120–250 words total. Plain language at about an 8th-grade reading level. Answer three things:

• what it does
• who gets it and how (do they need to apply?)
• how it came about: name the legislators who did the work before the person who signed it; say how long the fight took if it took years; note any notable support from both parties; and, when the net-impact test was a judgment call, say how it was paid for. Use no headings in the body. Say things in your own words and don’t paste from sources.

Officials

src/content/officials/{id}.yaml. The id is a lowercase slug of the common name: tim-kaine, kathy-hochul, zohran-mamdani, norfolk-city-council. Before creating one, check whether the file already exists.

name: Tim Kaine
party: D            # D, R, I, L, G, or NP (nonpartisan office)
office: U.S. Senator from Virginia
level: federal      # federal | state | local
jurisdiction: va    # place id where they serve (use `us` for President/VP/cabinet)
current: true       # holds this office today
ids: { bioguide: K000384 }   # members of Congress: bioguide id (see src/data/roster/federal.json)
                             # state legislators: openstates id (see src/data/roster/state-*.json)
url: https://www.kaine.senate.gov

For a former official, use the office they held when they did the credited work and set current: false (e.g., office: President of the United States, current: false for Joe Biden).

Executives who should show up in an address lookup get a seat:

seat: { place: va, title: Governor }

Bodies use kind: body and have no party.

Party is the party the person belonged to when they did the work. Use NP for officials elected in nonpartisan races (many Virginia city councils).

Checking status

Status claims age, so check them against the newest sources you can find, not just the original enactment coverage. Many 2021–2024 federal programs were changed in 2025 by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Pub. L. 119-21) or by executive action, and some were restored by courts or later laws. If you can’t confirm the current status, use the most recent state you can confirm, set as_of to the date of that evidence, and say so in note.