Editorial & Methodology

Last updated: July 2026

Who Runs This

The Tooms Intelligence Platform (TIP) is built and edited by Christopher Smoot, founder of Tooms Company. See the About page for background, and Contact for how to reach the editorial address directly.

Primary Sources, By Section

Every figure on this site traces back to one of these primary sources. We do not use secondhand aggregators for the underlying facts.

• Bills & legislation — Congress.gov Bill Status API (official record of the Library of Congress).
• House votes — U.S. House Clerk, Electronic Voting System (EVS).
• Campaign contributions & independent expenditures — FEC.gov, Schedule A (itemized receipts) and Schedule E (independent expenditures), via the FEC's own OpenFEC API.
• Lobbying activity — lda.senate.gov, the joint House/Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database.
• Federal Register documents — federalregister.gov API (rules, proposed rules, notices, executive actions).
• Supreme Court opinions — CourtListener API (Free Law Project).

How Figures Are Computed

"Combined total" on a politician or PAC page means direct contributions to a candidate's authorized committee plus independent expenditures explicitly reported as supporting that candidate, added together. Independent expenditures reported as opposing a candidate are shown separately and are never subtracted from a support total. A candidate's own affiliated joint-fundraising committees and known payment-processing conduits (WinRed, ActBlue, and similar) are excluded from "outside funder" totals, using FEC's own affiliated-committee data rather than a hand-maintained list. Where a real organization (for example a PAC) files contributions under more than one name variant with the FEC, those variants are consolidated to one total; genuinely separate conduit accounts are not.

What's Sourced Fact vs. Labeled Analysis

On every bill, Federal Register, and Supreme Court article, the core facts — sponsor, dates, vote results, dollar amounts, docket numbers — are pulled directly from the primary source record above. Sections like "Outlook," "Arguments From Supporters/Opponents," "Funding Pattern," and similar framing sections are AI-synthesized analysis based on that sourced record. This is disclosed directly on every article page, not just here. Since July 2026, every article — sourced facts and analysis sections alike — is read by a human editor, who can edit any part of the draft, before it's approved to go live. That review confirms the piece is accurate and reasonably framed; it is not a claim that every individual sentence has been independently re-verified against a second source beyond the primary record cited above.

Known Data Gaps, Disclosed Openly

• Senate roll-call votes are not currently tracked — only House votes, because a reliable public API for Senate votes at the scale this platform needs was not available when voting records were built.
• Congressional committee membership rosters (current chair, ranking member, full membership) are not shown on committee pages — Congress.gov's public API does not expose this. Committee pages show real legislative activity (bills referred to or acted on by that committee) instead.
• For independent-expenditure-only organizations that file as something other than a traditional political committee (often a 501(c)(4), union, or corporation), the FEC does not require donor disclosure. Where this applies, it's stated directly on that organization's page rather than left unexplained.
• "Data as of" freshness lines on bill and politician pages reflect when our system last confirmed and re-synced with the primary source — a separate signal from editorial review, described below.

Byline and Verification

Article pages carry a byline and a "last verified against source" date. That date means the record was last confirmed to match the primary source document and regenerated — a data-freshness signal, separate from editorial review. Since July 2026, every article on this platform is AI-assisted drafted from the named primary sources above, held in a private review queue, and read, edited where needed, and approved by a human editor before it ever goes live — nothing publishes automatically. Articles published before this review system existed did not go through this step; we're not going to pretend otherwise, and any that get revisited for depth or accuracy go through the same review as everything new.

Corrections

When we find an error — in our own process, or reported by a reader — we fix the underlying data and record what was wrong, why, and what changed on our public corrections log. If you believe something on this site is inaccurate, send the specific claim, the page URL, and the primary source you're referencing to our corrections address.

What "Verified" Means on the Articles Index

Our Articles index shows a curated subset of what's published here, not everything -- a listing is only included once it clears a minimum substance threshold (currently a word-count floor plus our automated content-quality scoring where a score exists). Separately, every article on this platform -- indexed or not -- has already been through the human review step described above before publication. The index threshold is about depth and is a floor we intend to keep raising; the review step is about accuracy and editorial judgment, and applies to everything regardless of whether it clears the index bar.