BillTrack50: Beyond the Bill Number · Listen to informative discussion and analysis of current US legislation making the news, by Sarah Biffle and the folk at BillTrack50.

BillTrack50 - The 2025 review

·24 min·1 clip

Karen says AI summaries, Claude-powered bill questions, and manual reg-splitting all fed the regs project.

1. BillTrack50: Beyond the Bill Number centers on Karen's 2025 review of BillTrack50 and the software changes built around bills and regulations. 2. Sarah hosts the conversation, and Karen explains the product side of BillTrack50, including new tools, customer growth, and the company's use of AI. 3. The episode asks what BillTrack50 accomplished in 2025, why regulations matter, and how AI changed the workflow for tracking legislation and regs. 4. Karen says BillTrack50 grew every year for the last nine years and saw more traffic this year because bills have been going "crazy." 5. She names National Geographic, CNN, and The Guardian as outlets that used BillTrack50, and she treats that coverage as validation. 6. Karen says the company improved the website, added customers, and increased revenue, which she calls a strong year for the business side. 7. Sarah praises the AI summaries and the similar bills feature, then describes using it for a biotechnology post. 8. Karen explains that similar bills is "just math," because every bill becomes a vector and the system compares those numbers. 9. She gives the number 1,064 as the list of values used for each bill in that similarity model. 10. Karen says the biggest accomplishment of the year was launching Regulations 2.0 and making regulation tracking work the way it should have from the start. 11. She says the team completed that work in six or seven months, which she did not think would be possible. 12. Sarah says Dr. Jennifer Crosswright, described as the "reg queen," helped show why regulation tracking matters for family policy. 13. Karen says regulations are where "the rubber hits the road," because policies can change without Congress passing a new law. 14. She uses examples like EPA rules and state-level changes to show that regulations affect businesses and ordinary life. 15. Karen says some bills are framed as hearing protection, using silencer legislation as an example of political messaging. 16. She says AI helped BillTrack50 build summaries, a chatbot, a Claude-based question button, and internal tools for splitting registers into individual regulations. 17. Karen says the team manually split two years of regs, state by state, because AI was not yet reliable enough to do the job alone. 18. The conversation is upbeat, technical, and product-focused, with Sarah giving enthusiastic examples and Karen answering in detail. 19. Listeners interested in state policy, regulation tracking, AI tooling, and civic data products would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for a short, purely political recap without product and data discussion might skip it.

As heard by us

A practical year-in-review on how AI is reshaping BillTrack50's legislative tracking work.

BillTrack50's year-in-review conversation with Karen traces a clear arc: how the service has grown, what AI has changed, and how the core work still comes back to legislation and regulations.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want the messy mechanics behind better bill tracking, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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