Josh Tauberer ’04 Is Tracking President Trump’s Executive Orders

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Courtesy of Josh Tauberer ’04

More than 20 years after founding GovTrack.us to help people keep track of legislation in Congress, Josh Tauberer ’04 is now attempting to expand his site’s offerings to offer similar information for presidential executive orders.

Now with a fundraising campaign using Kickstarter, Tauberer has already raised more than his $60,000 goal to begin offering a new newsletter that would include links to the official text of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, context from the GovTrack.us team about what each means, and a tracking of how the orders are implemented or challenged in court.

“This is not an anti-Trump project,” Tauberer emphasizes, noting that just as GovTrack.us does not “take sides” on legislation going through Congress, the site also won’t take sides on policy issues before the president. “It is a project to remind people that the rule of law remains important. We will continue — as we always have — trying to hold our government accountable.”

The expansion comes after more than two decades of running GovTrack.us essentially as a side hustle job; Tauberer works full time as the head of product development at the software engineering company LARSA Inc. He came up with the idea for GovTrack during a freshman seminar about the intersection of technology, law, and free speech, when he found that the available information about congressional legislation was not exactly easy to use.

“I thought if I gathered all that information about bills and votes in Congress, that I could make it more useful for people, and through that make a more accountable government,” says Tauberer, who has also testified before Congress and lobbied for legislation that would make congressional actions more available to the public. “Whether we got the more accountable government, I don’t know, but that was the idea.”

The site allows users to read the text of legislation, track its status, and note who voted for or against it. It also includes news and commentary by a team of contributing writers. He sees the work he does as “a type of journalism,” harking back to his days as an editor at The Daily Princetonian. The same would be true of the new product tracking executive orders: “In a calm way, we will tell people what’s happening.”

Tauberer says about five million people visit the site each year. Readers seem to span the political spectrum, he says, and the “vast majority” of the site’s traffic is from people who want to stay informed about what’s happening in the government. While he says he has seen a passion for following legislation over the years, the same passion has not existed for tracking the actions coming out of the White House.

“It’s a little bit tricky — it’s not like I didn’t want to do it before,” Tauberer says. In September, he was appointed to serve as a member of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, which advised the General Services Administration on federal open government and public engagement efforts. The committee was terminated in February, days after an executive order was signed to reduce the number of advisory committees deemed “unnecessary.” “There are unique issues happening today,” he says.