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freshcod3s

The credibility is the product

Method

Freshcod3s reads federal public records and surfaces what they say. This page is the receipt: which records, how often, what we can and can’t see, and the bar a finding has to clear before we publish it.

01 · Sources

What we read

Every claim on this site traces to one of these source records. We don’t resell other people’s aggregates.

Senate LDA
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings — registrant, client, issue area, income/expense, covered officials. Filed quarterly. The primary source for Track Lobby.
STOCK Act PTRs
Periodic Transaction Reports from House and Senate clerks — covered trades, asset, amount range, transaction date, disclosure date. The 45-day statutory window starts at the trade, not the disclosure. Primary source for Congress Trade Alerts.
Congress.gov
Member directory, committee assignments, bill status. Used for committee-overlap context on lobbying and trade records.
FEC
Federal campaign-finance filings — receipts, disbursements, committee filings. Currently consulted for context, not as a primary surface.
CourtListener
Federal docket and opinion text. Used for litigation context where a lobbying client or covered official has open federal proceedings.
Federal Register
Agency rulemakings, notices, executive orders. Provides the regulatory-movement layer behind the issue-area lobbying flows.

02 · Cadence

How often we read

Refresh frequencies are tuned to the source’s own publication rhythm. Faster doesn’t mean better when the upstream file only updates once a quarter.

  • STOCK Act PTRs ~30 min after clerk publishes
  • Senate LDA quarterly filings Daily pull during filing weeks
  • Congress.gov roster & committees Daily
  • Federal Register Daily
  • FEC, CourtListener On query, not preloaded

03 · Known limitations

What we can’t yet read

Honest about the holes. Filing in the public.

  • Lag

    The official database push lags the filer by hours to days. Our “~30 minutes after publish” means after the clerk publishes — not after the trade or expense actually happened.

  • PDFs

    Many Senate PTRs and some LDA filings are PDF-only. Our OCR layer is good but not perfect. Where parsing is uncertain, we link to the source PDF and don’t fabricate a structured value.

  • Aliases

    Member, registrant, and client names appear in multiple spellings across decades of filings. Our normalization is conservative — if two strings might be the same entity but aren’t certain, we keep them separate and surface the ambiguity.

  • Committee history

    Committee assignments shift across Congresses. We hold a point-in-time snapshot per record, not a continuous timeline.

  • Intent

    We read what was filed. We don’t infer motive. A late disclosure is reported as a late disclosure, not as a characterization of the filer.

04 · Finding flow

How a finding gets flagged

Not every record is a finding. The Public Record Signal feed leads only with records that imply power, money, delay, or conflict. A record reaches Signal when it clears one of these bars:

  1. 01

    Statutory lag

    Past the disclosure window written into the law — 45 days for STOCK Act PTRs, 20 days for LDA registrations, etc. The lag is rendered in signal-red; we don’t soften it.

  2. 02

    Committee overlap

    A member’s committee jurisdiction touches the issue area of a lobbying flow that names them or their staff as a covered official, and the dates overlap.

  3. 03

    Outsized magnitude

    A spend, trade amount, or contract size meaningfully above the rolling baseline for the same registrant, member, or issue area.

  4. 04

    Cross-source conflict

    Two source records that point in incompatible directions — a trade against a stated position, a filing that contradicts a public statement.

Records that don’t clear any of these bars stay browsable inside Track Lobby and Congress Trade Alerts, but they don’t get promoted to Signal. The bar is the editorial product.