Terms of Service

You may read, search, link to, and quote from the Site for any lawful purpose, including journalism, research, education, civic organising, and personal use. Attribution is appreciated but not required when you are quoting public government data; please credit Govwatch when you quote our original explanatory writing.

You agree not to:

• Use the Site to harass, defame, or threaten any individual, including any Member of Congress, candidate, staffer, or other person mentioned in the data.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any account, server, or system, or interfere with the normal operation of the Site (scraping at volumes that degrade availability for other visitors, DDoS, etc.).
• Republish the Site's original explanatory text or AI-assisted summaries as if they were government documents, or strip away source attributions.
• Use the Site or its data to make targeted advertising, employment, lending, housing, or insurance decisions about individuals.

Heavy programmatic use is fine for research; we ask that you identify your client with a reasonable User-Agent and keep request rates sane. If you need a data dump rather than scraping, email admin@govwatch.com.

The Site is provided “as is”. We aggregate third-party government data on a schedule (see the freshness timestamps in the footer). Source feeds occasionally lag, contain errors, or change format. We do our best to reflect the source faithfully and to correct errors promptly, but we make no warranty — express or implied — that any piece of information on the Site is accurate, complete, or current at any moment in time.

Nothing on the Site is legal, professional, financial, medical, or voting advice. Bill summaries explain what proposed legislation says; they do not tell you what to think about it or how to vote. If a decision turns on a piece of information you see here — for example, whether a law is in effect, how a member actually voted, or whether a campaign filing is complete — verify against the original government source linked on the page before acting on it.

Underlying government data — bills, vote records, member biographies, FEC filings, Federal Register documents, Census tables — is in the public domain or carries the licence of its publisher. Govwatch does not own this data and does not claim any exclusive rights to it. Each data section names its source.

The Site itself — including the code, design, original editorial writing, plain-English explanations, and the way data is structured, classified, and presented — is the work of Govwatch and its contributors and is protected by copyright. You may quote reasonable excerpts with credit; please do not republish the Site in bulk or re-skin it as your own product.

AI-assisted content. Some plain-English summaries are generated by large language models (Claude and Gemini) operating on official bill metadata, and are cached and reviewed. These summaries are labelled on the page where they appear. They are derivative explanations of public data, not original reporting.

Most of the Site is readable without an account. If you create an account — for example, to save a bill watchlist or sign up for the weekly digest — you agree to provide accurate information, to keep your credentials secure, and to take responsibility for activity on your account. You can ask us to delete your account and any associated personal data at any time by emailing admin@govwatch.com.

The Site does not host open-ended user-generated content (no comments, no forums). If we add such a feature in the future, these Terms will be updated to cover it.