The Challenge
Congressional agencies are swamped with an ever increasing legislative work load. Bills are often a combination of prior bills with obscure changes. Legislative Analysts often struggle to identify common sections of bills, track provisions reintroduced many times, and document their differences. This analysis is often an urgent, manual, time-consuming process involving thousands of pages of text that can have major impact.
The Solution
The Text Analysis Program (TAP) was developed to help Legislative Analysts quickly identify similarities and differences across new and prior legislation. TAP quickly finds complex legislative texts, identifies similar legislation, and highlights the differences. TAP also tracks provisions across bills, back to the 103rd Congress. As one TAP user said,“Our work will never be the same; it is that powerful.” TAP was developed by Rich Greenfield (Product Champion) and Dean Wilder (Senior Developer and System Architect). Their profound knowledge of legislative processes led to the development of TAP’s many powerful features. TAP uses the Microsoft .NET’s Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and A.J. Boggs’ PISCES search engine. TAP offers: Similarity searches Side-by-side document comparisons Advanced searching of provisions and bill text Provision tracking
The Results
TAP saves time and improves analysis Offers side-by-side views of complex/co-mingled documents Identifies legislative text from prior bills Improves efficiency (saved $5M+ over 8 years)