How we score bills
Every bill gets one score, 1 to 10, on the Billometer. It answers a single question.
Who does this bill actually benefit: ordinary people, or donors, corporations, and the powerful?
A 1 means a bill works against everyday people. A 10 means it works for them. Most bills land in between, and we show our work so you can disagree with the number and still trust the facts under it.
What we weigh
Who bears the cost, who gets the benefit
Does the bill shift money, risk, or power toward ordinary people, or toward donors, large corporations, and incumbents? Follow who pays and who profits.
Rights and recourse
Does it expand or shrink your ability to be heard, to sue, to vote, to know what's being done? Bills that quietly remove recourse score low.
Who is pushing it
Sponsorship and the money behind a bill are evidence, not proof. A bill bankrolled by the industry it regulates gets a harder look.
Real-world effect, not stated intent
We score what the text actually does, not what its title or its sponsors say it does.
Who's it for?
Alongside the verdict, every bill gets a beneficiary label: who it actually benefits. We decide it from evidence in the bill itself: its real effects, who is exempted in the text, the money behind it, and who is sponsoring it. The options are Everyday People, Workers, Big Business, a named Industry, the Wealthy / Donors, Government Power, or Nobody / Symbolic.
One rule we hold strictly: "who benefits" is separate from "good or bad for you." A bill that empowers a regulator to protect consumers benefits Everyday People, not Government Power. We apply the Government Power label only when a bill gives the state control at citizens' expense (surveillance, asset forfeiture, censorship), shown in the bill text. We do not treat government as bad by default.
Draft, then verify
Every summary is written from the official bill text, then checked by a second, independent pass that compares the draft back against that text. If the verification pass finds a claim the bill does not support, the summary is held back rather than published. It is not infallible, but nothing reaches the board without passing that gate.
Where we stand
We are nonpartisan by rubric, not by both-sides reflex. We do not score by party; we score by who a bill helps and who it hurts, using the criteria above. A bill from any party can score high or low.