Bill pages on BillTrack50 from the current sessions now include a Taxonomy section on the Summary tab. It shows the policy categories a bill belongs to, drawn from a standard classification scheme, with the matching generated by AI.

What taxonomy we use

The categories come from the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), an international academic initiative that classifies policy activity into a single, universal, and consistent coding scheme. CAP data is used by scholars, policy-makers, and journalists to track policy trends across time and between countries, and the scheme has been applied to legislation and other government activity in more than twenty countries.

The taxonomy organises policy into major topics — Health, Education, Energy, Civil Rights, and so on — each with more specific subtopics beneath. Because it's a consistent standard rather than something tied to any one legislature's committee structure or subject headings, it gives us a common language for describing bills across all 50 states and Congress.

See this help article for a full list of the categories, with examples. It also has a breakdown of how many bills from current sessions fall into each category and sub category. 

An example

Louisiana HB459 (2026) regulates the use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns, requiring disclosures when AI is used to create or alter political materials depicting a candidate, and revising campaign finance reporting requirements.

Our AI matches each bill to one or more CAP categories — many bills touch more than one policy area, and this one is a good example. Its Taxonomy section shows:

Civil Rights, Minority Issues, and Civil Liberties

• Campaign Finance and Political Spending
• Voting Rights and Issues

Two subtopics, reflecting the two things the bill actually does — something the official summary (a recitation of statute numbers) and the committee assignments don't convey as directly.

What's next

The main goal is taxonomy-based search. Keyword searching depends on the words a bill happens to use — a search for "artificial intelligence" won't find a bill that only says "synthetic media." Searching by taxonomy category instead will let you find every bill on a topic (or multiple topics) regardless of wording. We're working on this now and hope to release it soon.

In the meantime, you'll find the Taxonomy section on every bill page's Summary tab for bills from sessions which are or have been active in 2026.  Going forward, all bill pages will have a Taxonomy section.