Read and Understand a Bill

Tap any bill in your feed to open its detail page. This is where most of what cicada.guide does lives.

Status

The status tells you the current stage of the bill in the legislative process — where it is right now and how far it has gotten. Most bills never make it all the way through, so the status is often the fastest way to judge whether a bill is worth your attention today.

Explain This Bill

Tap Explain This Bill to get a summary of the latest version of the bill document, and to ask your own questions about it.

This is the feature to use when a summary raises more questions than it answers. Ask what a section actually changes, who it applies to, or what a term means.

Subjects

The subject tags on a bill show what topic areas it covers. Tap one to follow that subject; tap it again to unfollow. Following from a bill page is a quick way to build up your feed as you browse.

Elected officials

Further down the page you'll see the officials connected to the bill, color-coded by how they most recently voted on it. There's more on this in the article about contacting your representatives.

Share

Use the share button to send a bill to someone else — it links straight to this page.

The guided tour

The first time you open a bill, a short walkthrough points out each of these features in place. If you skipped it or want to see it again, you can restart it from the bill page.

About the summaries

Summaries are generated automatically from the official bill text. They're meant to get you oriented quickly, not to replace the bill itself. The full document is always available on the page, and for anything you plan to act on, it's worth reading the source.