Bill Passage Stage Methodology v2.0.0

Effective: September 8, 2026

Important: Government Receipts does not currently publish numeric bill-enactment probabilities. The bill indicator is a procedural-stage heuristic, not a prediction, forecast, statistical model, or historical passage rate.

Why numeric percentages were removed

The previous implementation displayed fixed historical percentages for several legislative stages without a checked-in historical cohort, numerator, denominator, source snapshot, inclusion rules, or reproducible calculation. Those percentages are retired in methodology version 2.0.0.

Current calculation

The input is the bill status text associated with the Government Receipts bill record and sourced from Congress.gov bill/status data. The classifier lowercases and trims the text, then applies these rules in order:

1. law, enacted, or signed → Became Law / Observed outcome.
2. president or presented → Sent to President / Heuristic stage: very advanced.
3. passed or agreed to → Passed One Chamber / Heuristic stage: advanced.
4. reported, committee, hearing, or markup → Committee Action / Heuristic stage: intermediate.
5. Otherwise → Introduced / Referred / Heuristic stage: early.

Audit fields

• Methodology version: 2.0.0
• Dataset version: null / not applicable
• Numerator: null / not applicable
• Denominator: null / not applicable
• Calculation: deterministic status-to-stage classification only
• Primary status source: Congress.gov bill and action records

Because no empirical rate is calculated, publishing a numerator or denominator would be misleading.

Requirements before numeric rates can return

Any future empirical passage-rate feature must publish a versioned dataset or reproducible extraction procedure, Congress/date coverage, unit-of-analysis rules, exact stage denominators, outcome numerators, deduplication rules, source retrieval information, exact formulas, sample sizes, and regression tests that prevent percentages from being shown without those audit fields.