# Every word on this site, in plain English

This site is built out of government documents, and government documents have their own vocabulary. Nothing here assumes you have met any of it before. 44 entries; each one says where the real authority lives so you can check it yourself.

## What the government publishes, and where

Almost everything on this site starts as a document the government was required to publish. These are the publications themselves.

### The Federal Register

The federal government’s daily newspaper, published every business day, in which agencies are required by law to print what they are doing before it counts.

It is not a summary or a news source. It is the place a rule legally has to appear, which is why an agency publishing something there is a fact you can check rather than an announcement you have to trust. A typical issue runs a few hundred documents.

*in statute — [44 U.S.C. ch. 15](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/44/chapter-15)*

Where you meet it: Every document on the daily issue came from here.

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#federal-register)

See also: Rule (and “final rule”), Notice, Public inspection

### Public inspection

A document that has been filed for publication but has not been published yet, made available early — usually one business day ahead.

It is the same document, seen sooner. A document on public inspection can still be withdrawn before it publishes, so it is a genuine preview rather than a guarantee, and we label it as one.

*in statute — [44 U.S.C. § 1503](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/44/1503)*

Where you meet it: The daily issue flags documents that were on public inspection first.

See also: The Federal Register

### The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)

The rulebook that all the individual rules add up to — the Federal Register is what changed today, the CFR is what the rules currently say.

Organised into 50 titles by subject. When a final rule takes effect, its text is folded into the CFR, and the rule itself becomes the historical record of the change.

*the publisher’s own guide — [eCFR — the continuously updated edition](https://www.ecfr.gov/)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#cfr)

See also: The Federal Register, Rule (and “final rule”)

### Executive orders, memoranda and proclamations

Written directions issued by the President — an executive order and a presidential memorandum both instruct the executive branch, and a proclamation is usually ceremonial or trade-related.

Executive orders are published in the Federal Register as a matter of course. Memoranda are published less consistently, which is a gap we track rather than paper over: some appear on whitehouse.gov and never in the Register at all.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Federal Register — presidential documents](https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents)*

See also: The Federal Register

### Public law, Statutes at Large, and the U.S. Code

Three names for the same statute at three stages: a public law is a bill after it is signed, the Statutes at Large is the bound record of it exactly as enacted, and the U.S. Code is that text filed into a subject-organised shelf.

This matters because they cite differently. “Pub. L. 119-101” identifies the act; “12 U.S.C. § 1701” identifies where a piece of it now lives. A rule almost always cites the Code, because that is where its authority sits after filing — which is why the Code, not the public law, is the durable way to connect a rule to the statute behind it.

*in statute — [1 U.S.C. § 112 (Statutes at Large) · 1 U.S.C. § 204 (the Code)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/112)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#public-law)

See also: Bill, resolution, and measure, Authority line

## How agencies make rules

Congress passes a law; an agency usually has to write the rules that make it operate. That second step is most of what the Federal Register contains.

### Agency

The part of the executive branch that actually carries out a law — the EPA, the FAA, the Treasury Department and about six hundred others.

Congress writes a law in general terms and hands it to an agency to make operational. A single document can be issued by more than one agency at once, which is why counts on this site can look higher than the number of documents.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Federal Register — agency list](https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies)*

Where you meet it: Every agency with activity gets its own page on the daily issue.

See also: Rule (and “final rule”), Delegation

### Rule (and “final rule”)

An agency’s binding instruction with the force of law — the thing that actually changes what you are allowed to do.

The word is broader in law than in speech: a rule can set a standard, license a product, or fix a price. “Final” does not mean permanent, only that the agency has finished this round and the rule now binds.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 551(4) — the statutory definition](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/551)*

Where you meet it: Counted separately from notices on every day page.

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#final-rule)

See also: Proposed rule, Effective date, The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)

### Proposed rule

A draft rule an agency publishes to say what it intends to do and to ask the public what they think, before it binds anybody.

It is the step that creates a deadline you can act on. A proposed rule is not law and may never become law — agencies withdraw them, and some sit for years.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 553 — notice and comment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/553)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#nprm)

See also: Comment period, Rule (and “final rule”)

### Comment period

The window during which anyone — a person, a company, a city — can file a written response to a proposed rule, and the agency has to consider what comes in.

It is the most concrete thing on this site, because it closes on a specific date and after that date the opportunity is gone. That is why comment deadlines are pulled out and dated rather than left inside the document text.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 553(c)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/553)*

Where you meet it: Listed under “dated obligations” on each day page.

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#notice-and-comment)

See also: Proposed rule, Docket, Dated obligation

### Notice

A Federal Register document that announces something without changing a rule — a meeting, a funding opportunity, an information collection, a decision on one application.

Notices are the bulk of most issues by count and the least uniform in importance. A notice can be routine or it can be the only public record that a programme is ending.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Federal Register — document categories](https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/understanding-the-federal-register)*

See also: Rule (and “final rule”), The Federal Register

### Effective date

The date a rule starts binding, which is usually not the date it was published — 30 days later is the common case.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 553(d)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/553)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#effective-date)

See also: Rule (and “final rule”), Dated obligation

### Docket

The folder holding everything filed on one rulemaking — the proposal, every comment received, and the supporting studies.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Regulations.gov](https://www.regulations.gov/)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#docket-id)

See also: Comment period

### The Unified Agenda

A list agencies publish roughly twice a year of the rules they expect to work on, with dates they expect to hit.

Those dates are the agency’s own estimate of its own future, and they slip often. We store the estimate as a stated intention, never as a schedule.

*chamber rule or executive order — [E.O. 12866 § 4 — regulatory planning](https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/pdf/12866.pdf)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#unified-agenda)

See also: RIN (Regulation Identifier Number), Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled

### RIN (Regulation Identifier Number)

A tracking number that follows one rulemaking from the agency’s plan through to the final rule, so the stages can be tied together.

*the publisher’s own guide — [reginfo.gov — the Unified Agenda](https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaMain)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#rin)

See also: The Unified Agenda, Docket

### Delegation

Congress handing an agency the authority — and sometimes the deadline — to work out the details of a law.

This is the hinge the whole site turns on. A law that delegates is a law whose real effects are decided later, by an agency, in the Federal Register, often years after the vote that made the news.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 551(4)–(5)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/551)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#delegation)

See also: Rule (and “final rule”), Authority line, Provision

### Authority line

The line near the end of a rule where the agency names the statute that lets it issue the rule at all.

It almost always cites the U.S. Code rather than the public law, which is why connecting a rule back to the act of Congress behind it is harder than it sounds — the two sides of that join are written in different notation.

*chamber rule or executive order — [1 CFR § 21.43 — authority citations](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-1/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-21)*

See also: Public law, Statutes at Large, and the U.S. Code, Delegation

## How Congress moves a bill

The vocabulary of the floor schedule and the sponsorship record — what the House says it may take up this week, and who put each measure forward.

### Bill, resolution, and measure

A bill is a proposed law; a resolution is a proposal that mostly governs Congress itself; “measure” is the umbrella word for either.

Identifiers look like H.R. 6644 (a House bill) or S. 1234 (a Senate bill), and the number restarts each two-year Congress — which is why the Congress number has to travel with it to mean anything.

*the publisher’s own guide — [GovInfo — bill types and what each is for](https://www.govinfo.gov/help/bills)*

Where you meet it: Every row on Floor Radar is a measure.

See also: Sponsor and cosponsor, Floor schedule, Public law, Statutes at Large, and the U.S. Code

### Sponsor and cosponsor

The sponsor is the single member who introduced a measure; cosponsors are the members who signed on afterwards to show support.

Cosponsorship is a public signal, not a vote, and it does not bind anybody. It is useful mainly as evidence of who in which state has attached their name to a thing before it reaches the floor.

*the publisher’s own guide — [U.S. Senate — glossary of legislative terms](https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary.htm)*

Where you meet it: The sponsor column on every Floor Radar week.

See also: Bill, resolution, and measure, none vs. unjoined

### Floor schedule

The list the House publishes each week of what it may take up on the floor — which is a plan, not a promise, and the House revises it.

A week with no schedule published is almost always a recess. We record that absence as a finding rather than showing an empty page, because “they published nothing” and “we failed to look” are different facts.

*the publisher’s own guide — [docs.house.gov — weekly floor schedule](https://docs.house.gov/floor/)*

Where you meet it: The whole of Floor Radar.

See also: Suspension of the rules, Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled, Bill, resolution, and measure

### Suspension of the rules

A fast track the House uses for measures expected to be uncontroversial: debate is capped, amendments are barred, and passage needs two-thirds instead of a simple majority.

Seeing a measure listed under suspension tells you the leadership expects it to pass easily. It does not tell you it will.

*chamber rule or executive order — [House Rule XV](https://rules.house.gov/)*

Where you meet it: One of the postures shown against each measure on Floor Radar.

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#suspension-of-the-rules)

See also: Floor schedule

### Roll call vote

A recorded vote in which each member’s individual yes or no is published, as opposed to a voice vote where only the outcome is.

*in statute — [U.S. Const. art. I, § 5, cl. 3](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#roll-call-vote)

See also: Bill, resolution, and measure

### Provision

One numbered piece of a law — a section or a subsection — as opposed to the whole act.

Working at this size is the central choice behind this project. A 900-page act is not one thing that succeeds or fails; it is hundreds of separate instructions, and they land at different times, in different agencies, with different results.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Office of the Law Revision Counsel — how the Code is organised](https://uscode.house.gov/about_code.xhtml)*

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#provision)

See also: Delegation, Consequence card

### Section-by-section

A summary document, usually written by a committee, walking through what each section of a bill does in ordinary prose.

Useful for orientation and not authoritative: it is a description of the text by people advocating for it, not the text.

*the publisher’s own guide — [GovInfo — congressional committee reports](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crpt)*

See also: Provision, Bill, resolution, and measure

### State law

The laws of the fifty states, which we name here as something this site does not yet cover.

It is listed in our own map of sources as uncaptured. Saying so is the point: a reader should be able to tell what we have chosen not to collect from what we simply failed to collect.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Library of Congress — guide to state and territory law](https://guides.loc.gov/us-states-territories)*

See also: none vs. unjoined

## How we handle the record

Words for what we do to a document after we fetch it. Several of these are ours rather than the government’s, and the entries say which.

### Capture

One recorded attempt to fetch one document at one moment, kept whether it worked or not.

A capture that returned nothing is still a capture, and it is still stored. “We looked and the page was gone” and “we never looked” are different facts about the world, and a record that cannot distinguish them cannot be checked.

*our term, not the government’s — Our term. The design record is not published.*

See also: Content address (hash), Provenance, as_of (point-in-time)

### Content address (hash)

A short fingerprint computed from a file’s exact bytes, used as its name — change one character and the fingerprint changes completely.

Storing documents under their fingerprint means we cannot quietly edit one after the fact: the altered copy would not match the name it is filed under. It also means an unchanged document is recognised as unchanged rather than stored twice.

*the publisher’s own guide — [NIST FIPS 180-4 — SHA-256](https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.180-4.pdf)*

See also: Capture, Provenance

### Provenance

The record of where a piece of information came from and when — which URL, fetched at which moment, returning which exact bytes.

Every number on this site is supposed to be traceable back through provenance to a government document you can open yourself. If something here cannot be traced that way, that is a defect, not a style choice.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our term — shown in the provenance block on every day page](/daily/)*

See also: Capture, Citation, as_of (point-in-time)

### Citation

The pointer from a claim on this site back to the exact government document that supports it.

The Federal Register’s HTML and XML versions are convenience renderings; the PDF is the official text. Where the two could differ, the PDF is the one to cite, and our links say so.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Federal Register — legal status of its editions](https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/understanding-the-federal-register)*

See also: Provenance

### as_of (point-in-time)

A stamp saying which day’s knowledge a page reflects, so you can ask what was known on a past date instead of only what is known now.

Answering a question about last month with this month’s information is the single easiest way to make a record look better than it was. Our tools refuse a historical date rather than answer it with today’s data.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our term — printed at the top of every page](/daily/)*

Where you meet it: Printed at the top of every page on this site.

The precise version, for specialists: [the lexicon](/lexicon/domain-language.html#as-of)

See also: Provenance, Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled

### none vs. unjoined

Two different blanks: “none” means we checked and there is nothing, “unjoined” means we have not checked yet.

Most systems render both as an empty cell, which quietly turns a gap in our work into a claim about the world. A missing sponsor on Floor Radar says “not yet retrieved”, and it will never say “no sponsor”, because every measure has one.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our term — visible in any blank sponsor cell](/floor/)*

Where you meet it: Anywhere a field is blank on Floor Radar.

See also: Sponsor and cosponsor, Provenance

### Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled

A label on every date we show: “statutory” means the date is printed in a published document, “scheduled” means somebody has announced an intention and can change it.

A comment deadline in a published rule is statutory. A measure appearing on next week’s floor schedule is scheduled. We do not have a third label for a date we worked out ourselves, because we do not print those.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our label — every date on Floor Radar carries one](/floor/)*

See also: Dated obligation, Co-occurrence, not causation

### Dated obligation

A date printed in a document by which somebody has to do something — comments close, a rule takes effect, a report is due.

These are extracted into their own list because they are the part of a document that expires. Everything else can be read next month; a comment deadline cannot.

*in statute — [5 U.S.C. § 553](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/553)*

Where you meet it: The dated-obligations list on every day page.

See also: Comment period, Effective date, Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled

### Co-occurrence, not causation

Two things landing in the same week appear together on our calendar because they share a date — never because one caused the other.

We hold no evidence linking any particular bill to any particular rule, so we state none. When a bill and a rule appear side by side here, the only claim being made is that both happen that week.

*our term, not the government’s — Our rule. Stated in every calendar answer the MCP server returns.*

See also: Certainty: statutory vs. scheduled, Authority line

### Agency sentence

The one-line description under an agency’s name, written by a language model from that agency’s published fields and labelled wherever it appears.

It is the only text on this site that is not either quoted from a document or computed from one, which is exactly why it is labelled. It restates fields; it does not assess them.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Anthropic — Messages API](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/messages)*

See also: Citation

### Consequence card

A short card about one provision of one law: what it requires, who it lands on, and by when — each line pointing back to the document it came from.

None of these are published yet. They are held back from the site deliberately until each has been checked by hand against its sources.

*our term, not the government’s — Our term. Nothing is published yet, so there is nothing to link.*

See also: Provision, Dated obligation

## What is on this site

Each published page and machine endpoint, and what it is for.

### The daily issue

One page per publishing day listing what the Federal Register carried, plus a page for each agency that was active.

*our term, not the government’s — [/daily/](/daily/)*

See also: The Federal Register, Dated obligation

### Floor Radar

One page per week of the House floor schedule, showing what may come up and who sponsored it.

*our term, not the government’s — [/floor/](/floor/)*

See also: Floor schedule, Sponsor and cosponsor, none vs. unjoined

### Quotes

Short quoted passages with a permalink and a share image for each.

*our term, not the government’s — [/quotes/](/quotes/)*

See also: Citation

### The memoranda page

A page listing presidential memoranda, marking for each one whether the Federal Register ever printed it.

It exists because a memorandum that was never printed leaves no hole in any numbered list, so its absence is invisible everywhere else — there is nothing to notice. Listing them together is the only way the gap becomes something you can look at.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our page — built from whitehouse.gov and the Federal Register](/presidential/)*

Where you meet it: Linked from the Executive Office block on the daily issue.

See also: Executive orders, memoranda and proclamations, none vs. unjoined, The Federal Register

### This page

The page you are reading: every term this site uses, explained without assuming you have met any of it before, with a citation for each.

It is checked against the project’s own map of itself on every build. Each source, store, dataset and page in that map has to be claimed by an entry here, so a new kind of data cannot reach the site without somebody first explaining it in ordinary words.

*our term, not the government’s — [Our page — the machine-readable version is /plain/data/plain.json](/plain/)*

See also: The lexicon, The data model

### The lexicon

The same subject as this page written for specialists — 206 terms of art, defined briefly and precisely for somebody who already works in the field.

If an entry here feels thin, its lexicon counterpart is where the exact version lives. Entries on this page link across wherever one exists.

*our term, not the government’s — [/lexicon/domain-language.html](/lexicon/domain-language.html)*

### The MCP server

A machine endpoint that lets an AI assistant read this archive directly, so it answers from the stored record rather than from memory.

MCP is an open standard for connecting assistants to data sources. Every answer it returns carries its citations and a note about what is missing from the coverage.

*the publisher’s own guide — [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/)*

See also: Citation, as_of (point-in-time)

### The data model

A map of every source, store, dataset and page in this project, checked automatically against the code so it cannot drift out of date.

This glossary is bound to that map: every entry in it has to be explained here in plain words, or the build fails. That is what keeps this page current when a new source is added.

*our term, not the government’s — [/docs/data-model/](/docs/data-model/)*

See also: Provenance

### Gov graph

A diagram of how the parts of government connect, and where people outside government file into it.

*our term, not the government’s — [/gov-graph/](/gov-graph/)*

See also: The data model

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