NYT, 2007:
"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )
There's a good chance it could have the opposite effect. The public doesn't pay as much attention to the workings of the government as donors do.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.
is money the problem or just that most people don't care about most things, but a few people REALLY care about a few things? There's plenty of groups without much money that still gum up the works because they're persistent.
I've always wanted this. It's such an obvious idea when you're a software engineer.
The system would be gamed by the politicians.
Insert language you know will never get enough votes
Don’t strike out but add language to make it useless
Plus the bill sponsor often makes changes others ask for, so the true author isn’t noted
It would be a mess and ignored by the public after a while
This is already regularly done. One side or the other will propose or amend a bill that they claim does [popular thing x] and then add in some clause that they know will get voted against, so they can then claim that [other side] voted against [popular thing x].
This is often especially cynical because [popular thing x] is often something that neither party wants to pass. So a very recent example of this was an act against insider trading by politicians, that was bundled with a voter id law. Neither side wants to clamp down on insider trading from politicians, so the entire act was DOA. It was nothing but bread and circuses.
The politicians wouldn’t have the option to game it if additional data is pulled in automatically like lobbying disclosure filings, public watchdog databases, etc. for the final overview. A swift turn from limiting the total sugar amount in soda would look quite bad if the politician got lobbied by Big Soda.
Git does allow multiple contributors on each commit. Of course people can lie, but it's a matter of policy in the end. Make it a crime to not add all contributors to a diff.
Every system gets gamed, and so is the current one. The goal is that the people can more easily stay informed. Even with mixed authors problem you highlight would be still an improvement.
But there would be a papertrail that can be revisited. And journalists can access to keep people informed of systemic or major issues.
There already is a papertrail. It's just that it's extremely convoluted to navigate. This isn't a technology problem.
Convoluted to navigate sounds like a problem that could be solved with technology…
Or just name the pile of slop "The Patriot Act" - then you can legally hang anyone treasonous enough to votes against whatever may be inside.
Same. What I would like to see is Git for non-technical users, built as a public platform that is open source, hosting this.
I do think there are some Markdown-based open source projects that might fit the bill.
Wouldn't a wiki basically be exactly that?
There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has version management built-in. Very few people use it. This isn’t a technology problem.
To be fair, version control built into office suits are often hidden away or have other UX patterns that aren’t comfortable for nontechnical folk. So they either still get scared by it, or don’t even know it exists.
Yet there is a demand for version control for nontechnical people. And I know this because I’ve seen enough files called “copy of important thing” or “important thing 2”.
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We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.
Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job
The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.
Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction
I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody who thinks they don't need to understand their local politics.
Are you referring to Mein Kampf?
I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with the law in a much better way than they can now.
However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.
If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?
Why not both. I'm sure that more visibility would result in more requests for press inquiries.
Exactly, it’d make the press’ work easier, and maybe enable more people or entities to look into this topic over all, too.
We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.
In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.
For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.
> because git is an interface that agents are experts at using
I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around. Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.
An agent will use whatever interface is available, including no interference, won't give up due to the task being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text, writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.
LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans who need finely crafted tools.
I am sure with LLMs the time to craft those tools to fetch the data and put them back in a git repo (for example one repo per legislative project) would not be too hard to do.
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job
The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.
Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.
A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.
Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
>Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job ...
Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.
> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors
You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.
When a measure becomes a target yada yada.
(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)
Bills are written in English but I'd view them as code. It's not interesting to track changes in code for outsiders. Sure, it's cool for programmers, but users of software do not care if you unrolled a for-loop and who did it. They don't even know what that is and the same holds for bills. We have journalists for that and nobody is willing to pay for that because nobody gives a shit about a functioning democracy. Now that's one hell of a problem git ain't going to solve.
The great promise of crypto-contracts was to be able to write rules as code and have them be deterministic (instead of requiring a judge to rule on it) and even have unit tests. Instead it seems we are moving towards a world where rules are written in English and judged by biased LLMs.
I couldn't care less about crypto currencies, but crypto contracts had the potential to replace much (although not all) of the bureaucracy around governments and justice systems. I am very sad it didn't take off.
"crypto contracts had the potential to replace much (although not all) of the bureaucracy around governments and justice systems"
It's a matter of time.
99% of the legislation changes are made by 20 something interns, on behalf of someone.
Indeed, both the name of the intern and the attribution on behalf-of should be required in the signed commit.
..and the name of the lobby group that prepared it for the intern.
That was the same for the software patent directive, we had leaks of amendments proposed by big companies, we could see that Members of Parliament were just copy pasting them.
Such a requirement would not do what you think it would. There would not be names legislator or even aids as commit authors. The commit authors would be members of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel[1].
The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan, impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is more partisanship in government not a concern?
The second issue with transparency is that communication between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change would affect the organization and its members is not something to be taken lightly.
A more convincing argument for transparency would address impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the system exists which is table stakes for changing it.
1. https://legcounsel.house.gov/
> Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan.
Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.
Agreed, that is just a factual error. One has to wonder about the motivation of that statement.
It's like the people that complain their favoured politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that politician just commits lots of crimes.
The authors are lobbyists of big corporations nowadays.
This is why I believe we should do something else than elections of politicians.
Go on?
There are several alternatives, like for example a political party where 1000 random citizens are picked up for analyzing and voting on every file. Next file next 1000 batch of random citizens are picked.
We could also let people vote directly on their own laws without intermediaries.
> the public would know
By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a glasperlenspiel, i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do middle-classes.
More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid that won't happen anytime soon.