# Republic OS An open, version-controlled mirror of public power in the United States. Government is already software: statutes are code, agencies are processes, elections change the maintainers, and a bill is a pull request against the law. What government has never had is a **changelog**. This repository is that changelog. **The diff is the product.** Every file here mirrors the observable public state of a government entity or legal text as a deterministic, sourced, human-readable record. When government changes, the files change, and git makes the change visible, permanent, and inspectable. ## What's in here today 302,874 markdown records, every one schema-validated: | Entity | Count | What it is | |---|---:|---| | **Person** | 13,329 | Current officeholders — federal, all 50 state legislatures, and Florida down to the municipal level. Federal members carry their bioguide ID, leadership roles, and committee seats. | | **Body** | 275 | The institutions themselves — the U.S. House, the Senate, 49 committees, 181 subcommittees, and now the **executive branch**: the 15 Cabinet departments and the 21 Executive-Schedule Level I offices, minted from the Code's own enumerations (5 U.S.C. §§ 101, 5312). | | **Candidate** | 2,494 | Everyone running for federal office in 2026, from FEC filings. | | **Jurisdiction** | 29,905 | Every U.S. county (3,131), all 435 congressional districts (Census demographics on 363), every state legislative district (4,927 house, 1,897 senate), and **every incorporated municipality in the country — 19,513 cities, towns, villages, and boroughs** — keyed by Census place GEOID, with officeholders attached where the mirror has them. | | **LegalText** | 59,740 | **The complete United States Code** — every section of all 53 titles that carry content (Title 53 is reserved), from General Provisions to Wildlife, mirrored section-by-section from the official OLRC USLM XML at release point 119-100 (current through Public Law 119-100). | | **Bill** | 197,131 | **Enacted legislation from all 50 states** — every bill and resolution the states enacted, each with its version chain (the diff), action timeline (the PR events), sponsors (the authors), and roll-call votes (the merge decisions), from the OpenStates bulk snapshot vintage 2026-07-01. If the U.S. Code is the deployed branch, these are the merged pull requests. | And the axes now cross: **27,804 authority edges** link 17,031 U.S. Code sections to the executive offices they empower, so the Attorney General's node lists every one of the 2,386 sections that vests authority in it. Law and power are no longer separate piles. The mirror answers, with receipts: *who holds power, who runs the institution, who's running, what each place is made of — down to the city, what the entire body of federal statutory law says,* and *which office each law empowers* — and, through git, *what changed.* ## How it works ``` raw source exports deterministic build validated tree data/*.jsonl ──► scripts/build.py ──► data/jurisdictions/** data/legal/raw ──► scripts/ingest_*.py ──► legal/** depot: legislation ──► ingest_legislation.py ──► legislation/** (committed as-is) (one pass) (OKF markdown + YAML) ``` - **Format** — Markdown with YAML frontmatter, [OKF](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md)-conformant, validated by JSON Schema in [`/schemas`](schemas). Human-readable in any editor or on GitHub; machine-readable by any agent. - **Deterministic** — `make build` and `make legal-us-code` regenerate their trees from committed raw sources and pinned official snapshots. Records change only when government changes, so every diff is signal. - **Sourced** — every record carries field-level provenance and a confidence level. This repo is a *mirror*, never the authority; official sources remain the source of truth. - **Raw-first** — source exports land in `data/*.jsonl` untouched before any transformation, so the origin is always recoverable. ## Commands ```bash make build # regenerate the entity tree from the raw exports make legal-us-code # regenerate the U.S. Code legal corpus (TITLES="1 2 ..." overridable) make legislation # ingest enacted state legislation from the depot export (LEG_STATES="fl ca" overridable) make validate # OKF + schema + link-integrity checks on all records make changelog # what changed in the government since the last commit make board # rebuild the Board's inlined data from the tree make check # build, then validate — the full gate ``` Everything runs on the Python standard library. No dependencies to install. ## Documentation - [Government as Code](docs/government-as-code.md) — the philosophy: why git, and what its primitives mean for government - [Data Model](docs/data-model.md) — entity types, IDs, the file format, the jurisdiction tree - [Sources](docs/sources.md) — where every fact comes from, and how current it is - [Legal Corpus](docs/legal-corpus.md) — deterministic legal text mirroring, raw snapshots, manifests, and checksums - [Legislation Corpus](docs/legislation.md) — enacted state law across all 50 states, bill-as-pull-request, raw off-repo on the depot - [The Board](docs/board.md) — the county map view, how its data is rebuilt, and how to redeploy the Artifact - [Roadmap](docs/roadmap.md) — what exists, what's next - [Contributing](docs/contributing.md) — the disciplines, and how to add a source - [Technical Brief — Government as Software](Technical%20Brief%20—%20Government%20as%20Software.md) — the founding document - [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md) — the civic changelog, generated from git history ## The disciplines — the v1.0 target This repository is a **prototype testing a theory**, not a finished mirror. Until it earns a `v1.0`, **main is the workbench**: history is malleable — rebase, squash, force-push, and prune are all fair game — and raw source snapshots live off-repo (on the depot), so the tree stays lean while the shape is still moving. What's committed here is the *product* (the entity + legal records) and its *provenance* (manifests and SHA-256 checksums); the raw bytes those hashes anchor are recoverable off-box. The disciplines the finished mirror will be held to — and which lock in at `v1.0`, once there's a record people depend on: 1. **Never overwrite** — a change is a new commit, not a clobbered file. Deletes are diffs. 2. **Never rewrite history** — no force-push, no squash. The past is load-bearing. 3. **Always push off-box** — one copy is a single point of failure; more is not. 4. **Raw-first, in-repo** — every source snapshot committed, so origin is recoverable from git alone. They are ideals for a mirror the public relies on. We're not there yet — we're finding out whether the theory holds. Substrate for [influence.tools](https://influence.tools).