Here’s what’s been improved on GovTrack in the summer and fall of this year.
- Permalinks to individual paragraphs in bill text is now provided (example).
- We now ask for your congressional district so that we can customize vote and bill pages to show how your Members of Congress voted.
- Our bill action/status flow charts on bill pages now include activity on certain related bills, which are often crucially important to the main bill.
- The bill cosponsors list now indicates when a cosponsor of a bill is no longer serving (i.e. because of retirement or death).
- We switched to gender neutral language when referring to Members of Congress. Instead of “congressman/woman”, we now use “representative.”
- Our historical votes database (1979-1989) from voteview.com was refreshed to correct long-standing data errors.
- We dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 in order to address with POODLE SSL security vulnerability that plagued most of the web.
- We dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 in order to allow us to make use of more modern technologies, which has always been the point of GovTrack.
GovTrack.us Site News 
Great work! But I read the other day about legislation being “snuck” by the House (Senate changes), US Congress OKs ‘unprecedented’ codification of warrantless surveillance.
Do you have plans for a diff utility that warns members of either house of changes to pending legislation?
Keep up the good work!
Patrick
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We actually already have a diff tool. If you go to bill text pages, there’s a comparison option on the right.
Unfortunately these situations usually go very quickly and the relevant documents are either drafts (which we don’t have access to in any systematic way) or Congress doesn’t post the documents until after it’s too late.
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