Transparency

How we decide what matters

A regulatory monitor is only as good as what it refuses to send you. This page documents the scoring and the gates in full — including the ones we added because our own engine got it wrong. The thresholds below are read directly from the running code, so this page cannot quietly fall out of date.

The path an item takes

1Poll. 11 government and legislative feeds, daily, plus 43 primary sources polled every 2 hours by the monitoring tier. Each is named publicly, with the endpoint we read.
2Stage. Every item is stored with the publisher’s original payload, a canonical link hash, and the time we first saw it. Staging is not public and nothing is customer-facing at this step.
3Diff. Changes are keyed by a content hash, so an amended bill reads as a change and a re-published notice does not read as news.
4Classify. Each item gets a materiality tier (A/B/C) and a signal score, plus a plain-language summary and a suggested action.
5Review. Tier A and Tier B are held for a person. Nothing in those tiers reaches the public feed without human approval.
6Publish. Approved items appear on the feed with a link to the primary source.
7Deliver. A separate decision from publishing. Most items are never emailed to anyone.

What we watch, and what you are told

These are two different sizes, and we keep them apart on purpose. A monitoring list is easy to grow and easy to oversell.

Scope — what we read

All 50 state legislatures and DC through LegiScan, 11 pipeline feeds, and 44 primary sources — 14 federal and 30 state — polled every 2 hours and stored with full provenance. This number is large, and it is the honest description of the sweep.

Coverage — what reaches you

Far smaller, and gated by everything below on this page. A source joining the sweep does not put anything on the feed and does not send anything to anyone. It only means that if that publisher posts something material, it is in front of a reviewer instead of missed.

We also publish the 3 surfaces the monitoring tier does not reach, and what covers them instead, on data sources. One of them is blocked by the publisher to non-browser clients; we disclose that rather than disguising what we are.

The three materiality tiers

Volume is not thoroughness. Most of what a regulatory sweep catches is real, sourced, and irrelevant to a practice — so we tier it and say which is which, rather than presenting a border-refusal record as though it were a rule change.

Tier A

Critical

default route: Today’s batch

A rule changed, and there is a concrete action a practice must take.

For example: A state enacts a supervision requirement with a January 1 effective date. A GLP-1 comes off the shortage list, ending the compounding basis for it.

Review: Human review, always.
Where it goes: Feed, the weekly Brief, and — only if it clears two more gates below — the daily email.

Tier B

Monitor

default route: Include in Brief

A real regulatory development that does not yet demand an action.

For example: A scope-of-practice bill is introduced and referred to committee. An FDA guidance document opens a comment period.

Review: Human review, always.
Where it goes: Feed and the weekly Brief. Never a standalone email.

Tier C

Background

default route: Feed only

Real, sourced, and on the record — but not something a practice acts on. Mostly single-shipment border actions and routine facility citations.

For example: One shipment of lidocaine refused entry at the border. Nine observations at a manufacturing facility.

Review: Two capped exhaust sources publish automatically (below). Everything else keeps its human.
Where it goes: Feed only. Structurally cannot email.

What has to be true before we email you

All three, always. Any one failing means the item still appears on the feed — it just does not interrupt anyone.

1. It is Tier A
A rule changed. Tier B and Tier C are structurally ineligible, whatever their score.
2. The recommended action is specific
The action has to point at something concrete — a lot or NDC number, a bill number, a calendar date or an effective date or deadline, or a shortage-list or 503A/503B status change. A named firm or product alone is not enough for an email, even though it makes a useful step on the page. Text that only says monitor for updates, stay informed, review your current practices, or verify your suppliers are licensedfails. That last one is a disclaimer wearing an action’s clothes, and it is the literal text on most of the capped border records in our corpus.
The rule of thumb the code encodes: if the item would still be true and unchanged tomorrow with nobody doing anything, it is not Tier A.
Why we don’t trust the classifier here. The engine tags its own actions “specific” or “generic”. Measured across the corpus, that tag disagreed with the definition above on 58% of tagged items — essentially all in the permissive direction. It rated “monitor future legislative sessions for renewed activity”as specific. So the gate is an independent check, not the classifier’s self-assessment.
3. The event is current
Published within the last 90 days — far tighter than the 18-month window the feed displays, because “worth putting on a page” and “worth interrupting someone today” are different bars. A future effective date overrides the age: a bill signed months ago whose duty starts next January is precisely the alert worth sending.
Why this gate exists.Two 2021 state bills were sitting in the emailable set, one of which said “comply before May 11, 2021”. The specificity gate could not catch it — a past date is still a concrete date.

Approving is not sending

These are two separate decisions, and fusing them is what turns a monitor into a nuisance. Approval says “this is true and public”. Delivery says “and here is how it reaches people”. Each approved item is routed explicitly:

Feed onlyAppears on the public feed. No email, ever.
Include in BriefAppears on the feed and in the weekly Brief.
Today’s batchRides the once-daily batch — one email covering the day, not one per item.
Send now (break-glass)A standalone send, reserved for break-glass. Most weeks: zero.

Tier A defaults to the daily batch rather than a standalone send, on purpose. Ten critical items on a busy day should be one email, not ten.

The one thing that publishes without a human

Tier-C background exhaust from exactly 2 capped sources — FDA Import Refusal and FDA Inspection Citation — publishes automatically. These are high-volume, low-consequence records that would otherwise bury a human queue. Every other item in every other tier and source waits for a person.

An auto-published item still has to clear every one of these, and anything that fails simply stays in the queue for a human:

Tier C, from one of the two capped sources named above
A signal score at or below 45 — a Tier-C item scoring higher means the tier and the score disagree, so we trust neither and escalate it
A primary source URL on an https government host — checked against an allowlist, not inferred
A content hash, so we know the deduplication is intact
A real title and body
A parseable date that is not in the future — a future-dated regulatory event is a parsing bug, not news

Tier C cannot email by construction — the automated publisher does not call the notifier at all. So the worst case for this path is an extra background record on the feed.

Severity labels

The badge on each item is a display of the signal score: CRITICAL at 90 or above, CAUTION at 70–89, MONITOR below that. These cuts were raised deliberately: at the original threshold, 63% of the corpus read CRITICAL, which makes the word mean nothing.

How the words and dates are written

A summary has to be true on any date.
No “new”, “coming”, “soon” or “now” — an alert is read for months after it is written. A bill that died says it died; a proposed bill says it is proposed. No exclamation marks and no commands in a summary: the step, when there is one, belongs in the “what to do”.
There is not always something to do.
When a change carries no specific step yet, the alert says so rather than invent one. That is why members get a specific “what to do” wherever a change calls for one, not on every item.
FDA warning letters are summarised from the letter.
We find the letter itself on FDA’s site, link to it as the source, and label it by the products it names. The recipient’s name and address are removed before any model reads the text — we do not name individuals.
A date is the publisher’s, or it is blank.
We print the date the publisher gives, only when it is exact to the day. When an item’s own title states a date that disagrees with the page’s by more than 30 days, the date is left blank: a wrong date is worse than none.
Your Compliance Brief leads with your own state.
Then federal items, then other states’ bills as an early warning. Board and agency web notices that carry no instruction — reports, job listings, scam warnings — are listed in the background record rather than presented as changes.

The states we do not cover, and why

None today. All 51jurisdictions carry a cited rules corpus, each adjudicated against its own source. While any state was uncovered, this section named it and said whose fault the gap was, because a coverage percentage hides exactly that; it will do so again if a state’s corpus is ever withdrawn.

What we will not do

Fabricate a date. If a source gives no date, the item shows no date. We never infer one, and we never substitute the date we found it.
Show an unreviewed item as reviewed. The public feed can only read approved items — the database enforces it, not just the application code.
Count coverage as results. We monitor all 50 state legislatures. The number of states with a change actually on record is smaller, and it is the number we print.
Turn a longer source list into a promise. Adding a source widens what we can see. It does not mean an alert will arrive from it, and no page here says otherwise.
Publish a speed we have not measured. We do not tell you how quickly you will hear about a change, because a number like that has to be measured over a sustained window and published with its method. When we have one, it will arrive with both.
Give legal advice. This is regulatory monitoring. Every item links its primary source, and the right next step for anything consequential is your own counsel.

See the pipeline’s current state on data status, or the feeds themselves on data sources.