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bill_subjects

Bill policy areas and legislative subjects

Subject assignments returned by Congress.gov or GovInfo BILLSTATUS, keyed by bill_id for a left join to congress_bills.bill_id. policy_area is one publisher category; subjects_json is a JSON array of legislative subject names, not separate bill records. The consumer trims and deduplicates names. All columns are VARCHAR, including subject_count. carrier and enriched_at record how and when the answer was obtained.

Coverage. Sampled; it grows each run and is not a complete subject census. From the 108th Congress every bill the bill family filled from GovInfo BILLSTATUS is copied from its congress_bills row; other bills from the 108th come from their folder's BILLSTATUS bulk zip, 32 folders a run, newest Congress first. Bills from the 93rd to the 107th, and bills whose BILLSTATUS file the reader refuses, come from the Congress.gov API with a key, up to 2,000 a run. No folder read and no API request, page or retry starts 20 minutes or more after the run began. A list-level bill in a folder the family reads waits for the family while its Congress is the current or previous one, and then goes to the API. (measured 2026-09-23)

Data quality. A missing row can mean pending, failed or outside the configured scope. An empty assignment can mean no assignments or that the source did not hold the requested bill; those outcomes are not separately represented in this table. Rows copied from the bill family are rewritten when the family's BILLSTATUS read changes; other answers are not asked again. The table does not retain the original response or its digest.

  • Parquet file: bill_subjects.parquet
  • MCP query_sql support: Configured; requires an available artifact.
  • Publication status: Not established by this schema page or its measurement date.
  • Row count: Not stated here; the MCP describe_table reply gives the live count under publication.
Column Type Description
bill_id VARCHAR Stable bill key shared with congress_bills.bill_id, such as 119-hr-1. Primary/dedup key; join by this identifier rather than title.
policy_area VARCHAR Publisher policy-area name after trimming, or NULL when the returned answer has no policy area.
subjects_json VARCHAR JSON array of trimmed, deduplicated legislative subject names. An empty array alone does not distinguish unassigned from not held.
subject_count VARCHAR Length of subjects_json, stored as a decimal string; not a count of bills or independent source responses.
carrier VARCHAR Source reader that answered: govinfo-billstatus from the 108th Congress on, congress-api below it or where the BILLSTATUS file was refused.
enriched_at VARCHAR UTC timestamp when this retained answer was shaped, not the publisher's modification date.