A research service for legislative intelligence — public records, sourced
Legislative View tracks the chain from IRS Form 990 grants to state-committee bill positions to cross-state template spread — surfacing the coordinated campaigns behind state legislation weeks before the press release.
i. The methodology
Public records have always held the answer. The work is the joining — federal 990 filings to state bill rosters to state-source position evidence. We do those joins continuously, against a database we control, with every join provable from a primary document.
We ingest every line item from IRS Form 990 Schedule I — grantor, recipient, amount, year — and join it through our organization registry to position records on bills you watch. Named grants are traced end-to-end, from filing image to bill testimony, with no inference between the steps.
4,409 official position records from state committee proceedings. Coalition maps aggregate organizations across every in-scope bill — ranked by sustained engagement, not headline volume — so single-shot testifiers don’t crowd out the operators with durable interest.
When boilerplate from one state shows up in three more, we surface it the same week. Pairwise sentence-transformer scoring across all 50 states — with an explicit cross-state filter so within-state sibling-bill paraphrases don’t drown out the actual template spread.
The valuable work isn’t summarizing bill text — everyone can do that now. The valuable work is connecting bills to the organizations testifying on them, those organizations to the funders behind them, and those bills to similar bills in other states. The thesis of the platform
ii. A specimen
See the deliverable, not a mockup.
“53 in-scope bills are active in California, with 1,917 official position records on file and a coalition map dominated by TechNet (11 bills opposed) on the industry side and Oakland Privacy (11 bills supported) on the civil-society side. The most-active bill, AB 1018 on automated decision systems, has 441 documented positions — 185 in support and 256 in opposition. Texas Appleseed (EIN 74-2804268) granted $10,000 to Consumer Federation of America in 2023; CFA subsequently testified in support of AB 1018.” Excerpted from the California brief — every claim has a numbered footnote linking to its primary source.
iii. Audit any claim
Quorum's AI Bill Tracker shows a "97% relevance" badge with no way to inspect what the model considered, and ships LLM-generated AI bill summaries no one can audit. We do the opposite — every number, every position, every grant traces to a primary document. Three examples pulled from the brief above:
“CA AB 1018 has 441 documented positions on file — 185 support, 256 oppose.”
“Texas Appleseed (EIN 74-2804268) granted $10,000 to Consumer Federation of America in 2023.”
“WA HB 2225 and WI AB 965 share 81% text similarity on AI chatbot regulation.”
Every cell in the brief works this way. Pick any number — we'll send the SQL.
Every buyer who has been burned by a hallucinated AI summary starts asking the same question: where did this number come from? That question is our entire product. For the analyst, the journalist, the program officer
iv. Built for whom
Quorum, Phone2Action, and FiscalNote serve in-house GR teams running outreach. We serve the researchers and analysts a step removed — buyers whose job is to understand the policy landscape before anyone in it gets contacted.
Investigative journalists
A WSJ-grade investigation needs a paper trail from grant to recipient to bill testimony. A CRM’s email outbox doesn’t help. A footnoted brief with the IRS 990 image URL on every grant does.
“Show me where this number came from.”
Hedge-fund policy analysts
When model legislation from a single state appears in three more, the affected sector reprices a week later. Template-similarity detection across all 50 states is the alpha. No CRM ships this.
“The risk isn’t the bill we know about — it’s the one we don’t.”
Foundation program staff
Before a foundation funds an advocacy organization, the program officer wants the coalition map — who else is in this fight, on which side, with what bill record. A CRM’s contact directory is overkill; the intelligence layer is the answer.
“Where would this grant actually land?”
State AGs & policy staff
When the same boilerplate that lost in California shows up in your state two months later, the lead time to draft an amicus or counterproposal matters. Cross-state similarity scoring is built for this. A CRM is the wrong product entirely.
“Is this our problem, or someone else’s problem we’re about to inherit?”
v. Inquiry
We’ll come back within one business day with a 20-minute walkthrough on your states, your bills, and the funder graph behind them.