How this record is made

This project records actions of the second Trump administration that raise questions under the Constitution or federal law, or that concern the use of public office for private benefit, retaliation against critics, the use of force, press access, election administration, or relationships with foreign governments. It is built so that every statement can be checked.

Structure

• Timeline is the ledger and the only place facts enter the project. Each entry is one dated line with tags, a text summary, and its sources. Each entry has a permanent identifier so every article sentence can point to the exact entry it rests on.
• Topic articles narrate one arc each. They contain no facts that are not in the Timeline. Every factual sentence carries a numbered footnote to the underlying source and to the Timeline entry it comes from.
• Digest compresses each article to three lines. Index is the map. Earlier working files that predate the ledger-first rule are retired and are not part of the published record.

Article structure

Every article has the same shape, so a reader always knows where to look:

1. Summary: one paragraph. What happened, why it matters in law, where it stands.
2. Background: the pre-existing law, institutions and precedent.
3. What happened: prose organised by thread (subheadings), not by date, followed by Key dates, a short dated list of the turning points linked to the ledger.
4. Why it matters: one paragraph per legal question, each opened with the authority it turns on (clause, statute, case), giving the question, each side’s stated position, what has been held and what remains undecided.
5. Outcome: Where things stand (prose); a Status table with a fixed vocabulary: In force, Blocked, Reversed, Concluded, Pending, Unresolved, whose last column names what would change the status and feeds the Pending Register; and Who is affected, a short paragraph and one bullet per documented effect on the public (number or named finding, date, source), each bullet carrying the status of the action behind it. Projections are attributed; causation is stated only as far as the source states it.
6. Key players: one line each.
7. Chronology: every ledger entry the article rests on, in date order, each linked to its Timeline block.
8. Sources: numbered footnotes to the outlets and legal authorities.

Source policy

1. Primary documents first: court opinions and dockets, the Federal Register, GAO decisions, inspector general reports, agency releases, congressional records.
2. Then mainstream reporting: AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, WSJ, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, BBC, Politico, The Hill, ProPublica, Axios, CNBC, the Guardian, and established regional outlets.
3. Specialist and trade press when they are the only coverage of an agency-level fact.
4. Wikipedia is a lead, not a citation. Where a Wikipedia article was the route to a fact, the underlying reference was opened and cited instead. Where that reference could not be opened, the entry says so explicitly: “(Wikipedia — underlying reference not retrievable for: …)”.
5. Opinion pieces, advocacy releases and think-tank commentary are not cited for facts. They may be cited, attributed, for a characterization that a named person or body made.
6. Facts a source could not confirm are marked (unverified) in the text. Contested facts are marked contested with both versions attributed.

Verification

Three checks stand between a draft and the published record.

• Does every footnote lead somewhere real? An automated check confirms that every footnote in every article points to a source, that every source listed is actually used, and that every news link in an article also appears in the ledger entry it rests on. Nothing in an article may rest on a source the ledger does not have.
• Is the law stated correctly? Every constitutional clause, statute, rule, treaty and court decision named in an article is read against its official text (Cornell’s Legal Information Institute for the Constitution and the U.S. Code, supremecourt.gov for Supreme Court opinions, the Federal Register and govinfo for executive orders and session laws, the courts’ own sites for lower-court opinions) and carries a footnote marked “legal authority” that links to that text. Where a court docket could only be confirmed through a secondary source, the footnote says so.
• Does each sentence say what its source says? Every ledger entry is checked sentence by sentence against its own cited sources by a reviewer who did not write it. A sentence the source does not support is corrected to match the source, given a source that does support it, or removed. Entries whose only sources are outlets that block automated reading are marked as resting on an unopened reference.

Rules applied throughout:

• A number is taken only from a page or document that was actually opened, never from a search-result summary.
• A source must be dated on or after the event it is cited for.
• Words like “first”, “only”, “largest” or “unprecedented” appear only inside a quotation or attributed to the person who said them.
• One person is given one title at a time; a change of title is its own dated entry.
• Two entries for the same day that cite the same source are checked to make sure they are not the same event written twice.
• Wikipedia is a lead, never a citation; the underlying reference is opened and cited instead.
• Archive copies and translation proxies of paywalled pages are not used; the direct link is cited or the claim is dropped.
• Nothing is invented: no URL, no quotation, no figure. A fact that cannot be sourced is removed rather than kept.

Before each publication the whole ledger is re-run through automated checks for these rules (dates against labels, sources against dates, sums against totals, titles against names, duplicates, missing sources) and every hit is reviewed by hand.

Coverage

The ledger is compared against complete outside inventories, so gaps are measured rather than guessed. Anything in an inventory that the ledger lacks, or mentions without the key facts, is researched and added as a dated entry. Each update round re-runs the comparison. The inventories:

• Executive orders, proclamations and memoranda: the Federal Register.
• Supreme Court actions with the administration as a party: the Court’s orders and opinions, SCOTUSblog, the Brennan Center’s tally.
• Findings that the executive violated spending law: the Government Accountability Office.
• Inspector general removals and office closures: the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, oversight.gov, press reports.
• Pardons and commutations: the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
• Litigation against the administration: the Just Security litigation tracker, with the Lawfare tracker as a cross-check.
• Deaths in immigration custody and uses of force: ICE’s own death notices, CBP’s use-of-force reporting, and the press.

What the record holds and what it misses

Measured against those lists, the record is close to complete: nearly every executive order, proclamation and Supreme Court action of the term has a dated entry, and the forty-two articles follow their subjects in detail.

Events that do not appear on an official list are harder. An arrest, a lower-court ruling in an untracked case, a resignation below Cabinet rank, or a reported statement reaches us only through news coverage, and no single source catalogs them. Our own checks have shown this is where the record has gaps. We are closing them systematically: each weekly update adds new sources for this kind of event and backfills earlier months in order, with the matching articles updated as entries are added. Until that work is finished, the absence of an entry should not be read as the absence of an event.

Known limitations

• Blocked outlets. AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Politico and several others block automated access. Facts those outlets reported exclusively reached the ledger through reprints, secondary coverage, or primary documents. Where a claim still rests on an unopened reference, the entry says so.
• Coverage is uneven. Formal acts and Supreme Court actions are nearly complete; events known only through news coverage are being backfilled (see “What the record holds and what it misses” above).
• Pending matters change weekly. The Known gaps section at the end of Timeline lists dated items to re-check.

Editorial standard

Prose is written to be neutral and checkable: no evaluative adjectives outside attributed quotations; characterizations attributed to the person or body that made them; legal conclusions stated only where a court or official body reached them, otherwise framed as the legal question, the authorities at issue, each side’s stated position, and what has been held. “Why it matters” sections are anchored to specific constitutional provisions, statutes and precedents.

Pending items

The Open items page lists every item whose outcome is not final (one row per case, nomination, deadline or investigation), with the Timeline entry it rests on, the event that would resolve it, the earliest date worth checking and the venue to check. Resolution rule: a new event becomes a new Timeline entry; a change in the status of an existing event becomes a dated Update note on the existing entry; in both cases the affected article’s Outcome section and Digest entry are refreshed. The list is rebuilt from the articles’ Outcome sections after each update round.

Corrections

• How to report one. Write to [email protected]. Name the entry or sentence and the source that contradicts it. Every message gets checked against the source and answered.
• Where to see them. A correction appears under the entry or article sentence it changes, and on the Corrections page, newest first.
• What a correction says. The date, the sentence as it was published, the sentence as it now reads (or that it was removed), and why, with the source named.
• Nothing is changed silently. Published text is never edited without a correction note, and the earlier wording is always quoted in full.