Data Attribution Policy

Source-first principle

LawLinter is built around public source records. Raw payloads, source URLs, endpoint metadata, fetched timestamps, parser status, and normalized natural keys should be preserved wherever practical so records can be traced back to their origin.

Primary source systems

• Congress.gov records, including bills, laws, amendments, summaries, committees, members, actions, related records, text-version links, and other legislative metadata.
• Official House roll call and vote-position data where available through official source endpoints or linked public records.
• Government Publishing Office and Congress.gov document links for official bill text, HTML text, XML, PDF, and related legislative documents.
• Congressional Budget Office cost estimate links and publication metadata when associated with bills through official Congress.gov bill records.
• USAspending.gov records when enabled, including federal awards, grants, contracts, loans, direct payments, recipients, agencies, obligation amounts, outlays, performance dates, and geography.
• FEC/OpenFEC records when enabled, including candidates, committees, relationships, filings, receipts, disbursements, and aggregate campaign-finance context.
• LDA.gov records when enabled, including registrants, clients, filings, lobbying activity descriptions, lobbyists, issue codes, government entities, and source filing links.
• FederalRegister.gov records when enabled, including proposed rules, final rules, notices, agencies, CFR references, dockets, comment links, official Federal Register URLs, GovInfo PDF links, and Regulations.gov links.
• Other public government source systems may be added later only when they can be cataloged, attributed, and separated from existing source systems.

Official sources remain authoritative

LawLinter compiles, normalizes, indexes, and analyzes public records, but it is not the official source of legal status, legislative text, votes, public laws, member records, committee activity, CBO publications, USAspending awards, filings, or campaign-finance records. The linked official source should be treated as authoritative whenever accuracy, compliance, citation, or legal meaning matters.

How attribution appears

Public pages, API responses, and exports should preserve practical source attribution through official source links, source-system names, source endpoint metadata, normalized record identifiers, fetched timestamps, parsed timestamps, and source-document URLs. User-facing pages should prefer human-readable official pages, while internal metadata may preserve API endpoints and payload references.

LawLinter-created data

LawLinter may create additional data layers from public source records, including search documents, relationship graphs, lifecycle statuses, affected-sector matches, bill text signals, fiscal amount extraction, deadline detection, agency mentions, statutory-reference rollups, vote analytics, source payload assessments, and API-ready normalized responses. These layers are LawLinter compilations or analysis aids. They are not official government conclusions, do not change source meaning, and should not be presented as official government interpretation.

CBO cost estimate context

CBO cost estimate records should be attributed separately from LawLinter-created fiscal text signals and other analytics. CBO context points to official Congressional Budget Office publications or publication metadata linked through source records. It should not be presented as LawLinter budget scoring, fiscal advice, policy advice, a prediction, or a complete statement of a bill's fiscal effect. Users should read the linked CBO source document for assumptions, scope, affected bill versions, dates, and official context.

USAspending context

USAspending.gov data should be attributed separately from Congress.gov, CBO, FEC/OpenFEC, LDA.gov, and Federal Register data. Award, agency, recipient, obligation, outlay, contract, grant, loan, direct-payment, and geography records are public spending context. They should not be presented as proof that a bill caused, authorized, required, changed, or endorsed a specific award, recipient, agency action, program, or payment.

Campaign-finance context

FEC/OpenFEC data should be attributed separately from Congress.gov and legislative data. Candidate, committee, contribution, disbursement, and filing records are related campaign-finance context and should not be presented as proof of influence, causation, endorsement, or that money caused legislative activity. Relationship bridges between lawmakers, candidates, committees, and legislation are context tools and must preserve confidence, evidence, and source separation where available.

Lobbying disclosure context

LDA.gov data should be attributed separately from Congress.gov, legislative data, and FEC/OpenFEC data. Registrants, clients, lobbying activity descriptions, issue codes, lobbyists, and filing records are related public lobbying disclosure context and should not be presented as proof of influence, causation, endorsement, lobbying effectiveness, or legislative intent. Bill-reference bridges are context tools and must preserve source text, confidence, evidence, and source separation where available.

Federal Register context

FederalRegister.gov data should be attributed separately from Congress.gov, legislative data, CBO, FEC/OpenFEC, and LDA.gov data. Federal Register documents, agencies, CFR references, dockets, comment windows, and related links are regulatory follow-through context and should not be presented as legal advice, a complete legal-status determination, proof that a bill caused a regulation, or an official LawLinter interpretation of regulatory effect. Users should verify legal meaning against official Federal Register, GovInfo, eCFR, Regulations.gov, and agency sources.

APIs, exports, and downstream use

API users, subscribers, export users, and downstream applications are responsible for carrying appropriate source attribution, legal notices, disclaimers, and official-source links into their own products where the data is displayed, republished, analyzed, or sold. Downstream users should not remove source notices or imply that LawLinter data is official government certification.

Corrections and source conflicts

If LawLinter appears to conflict with an official source, the official source should control until the local record can be reviewed. Local issues can include parser errors, stale data, broken links, duplicate records, incorrect relationship mapping, incorrect source attribution, or missing payloads. Page-specific issues should be reported through the report issue page.

Reuse limits and third-party terms

Public government records may have different reuse, attribution, bulk-download, API, rate-limit, trademark, or source-system terms. LawLinter does not grant rights that belong to a source system or third party. Users are responsible for reviewing and complying with applicable source-system rules and laws before republishing or commercializing data.

Contact

Questions about source attribution, reuse, API attribution, or local source-link errors can be sent through the contact page.