Using AI To Help Read The 1012 Page Omnibus Bill

I think we're all tired of these huge "must pass" bills here in the United States and our elected officials are signing into law legal documents they themselves didn't even read. It's gotten to the point where they play games—we'll shutdown the government if this spending bill doesn't pass but truly it was written by the lobbyists and interns. Not the politicians themselves. This time around it was released late in the evening Thursday and passed at 2AM Saturday morning with little to no time to react or read it.

Let's see if we can change that with Claude3

Claude3 is excellent at scanning and summarizing long documents as we've shown previously but how does it fare when facing off with the longest documents of all—spending bills from Congress. First off—we needed to find the original PDF of the entire Bill which is no easy feat. You can try to read it here yourself: https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240318/WDI39597.PDF it's over 1000 pages and even Claude can't handle the document in one piece. Let's split up 100 pages at a time and feed it into Claude and see what we can get.

Craft our prompt to get what we want to see

Human: I'm going to give you a file from a recent bill passed by the US congress and signed by the president. I want you to scan the document for high level bullet points and build a visualization on where all of the money is going. Be sure to point out interesting details that may be masked inside of the document and relevant to an American citizen who may not have time to fully read the document themselves.

Human: I'm going to give you 10 files and I want you to do your best to make a cohesive summary as we go then at the end generate a document that I can share with others to help them understand

So far so good—lets feed in the files and see what we get

Human: File 1/10

Claude: Here are the key high-level points from the document:

• This is a resolution providing for the House to concur in the Senate amendment to H.R. 2882 with an amendment, which appears to be the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024.

• The Act provides funding for various government agencies and programs for fiscal year 2024, including:

• Division A - Department of Defense

• Division B - Financial Services and General Government

• Division C - Department of Homeland Security

• Division D - Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education

• Division E - Legislative Branch

• Division F - Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs

• Division G - Other Matters

• For the Department of Defense (Division A), the Act provides funding for military personnel, operation and maintenance, procurement, research and development, and other defense-related activities. Some highlights:

• $50 billion for Army military personnel

• $58.6 billion for Army operation and maintenance

• $20.8 billion for Air Force aircraft procurement

• $27.9 billion for Navy research and development

• $33.6 billion for Navy shipbuilding and conversion

• $1.17 billion for Defense drug interdiction and counter-drug activities

• The Act also includes many general provisions related to Defense programs and activities, such as prohibitions on publicity and propaganda, limitations on transferring detainees from Guantanamo, and requirements related to small business contracting.

Human: File 2/10

Claude: The bill provides funding for various parts of the Judiciary branch for fiscal year 2024, including:

• $129.3 million for the Supreme Court, plus additional sums as necessary for salaries of the chief justice and associate justices

• $20.7 million for the care of the Supreme Court building and grounds

• $36.7 million for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

• $21.3 million for the U.S. Court of International Trade

• $6.0 billion for salaries and expenses of various other federal courts

• $1.45 billion for federal public defender organizations and court-appointed counsel

• $58.2 million for fees and expenses of jurors

• For the Courts of Appeals, District Courts and Other Judicial Services, up to $27.8 million shall remain available until expended for space alteration projects and furnishings.

• Funds are provided from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund for the Federal Claims Court to process cases under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

• The compensation for land commissioners in federal land condemnation cases is capped at the daily equivalent of the highest rate payable under the General Schedule pay rates.

Lots and lots of filler let's see if we can get the juicy stuff

Human: I'm going to send you a summary document that you generated for me based on the Omnibus bill that Congress passed last night. I want you to examine the document and produce a high level summary split into these sections: domestic spending broken down by how much money went to each government agency, defense spending and which region if possible, foreign aid, education, and finally any details in Bills that may not be present in the text and referenced elsewhere from your knowledge base that may be pertinent to an american citizen. Do you understand?

Claude: Thank you for providing the key details from the omnibus spending bill. Based on the information you've shared, here is a high-level summary organized into the requested sections:

Domestic Spending by Agency:

Department of Defense:

- $50 billion for Army military personnel

- $58.6 billion for Army operation and maintenance

- $20.8 billion for Air Force aircraft procurement

- $27.9 billion for Navy research and development

- $33.6 billion for Navy shipbuilding and conversion

- $1.17 billion for defense drug interdiction and counter-drug activities

Judiciary Branch:

- $129.3 million for Supreme Court

- $36.7 million for U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

- $6 billion for salaries and expenses of federal courts

- $1.45 billion for federal public defender organizations

Department of Homeland Security:

- Significant funding for border security operations, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity, emergency management, Coast Guard, and other homeland security missions.

Department of Health and Human Services:

- $407 million for NIH Innovation Account

- $1.5 billion for Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health

- Funding for substance abuse, mental health, Medicare/Medicaid, child/family services, and other core HHS programs

Defense Spending:

The details provided focus primarily on Defense Department funding allocations for personnel, operations/maintenance, procurement, research/development across the military services. No specific regional breakdowns were mentioned.

Foreign Aid:

- $1.54 billion for U.S. contributions to international organizations

- $1.37 billion for international peacekeeping activities

- $3.99 billion for global health programs

- $4.4 billion for development assistance

- $4.7 billion for international disaster assistance

- $4.3 billion for Economic Support Fund

- $500 million for assistance to Europe/Eurasia/Central Asia

Allocations were also provided for regions like Burma/Myanmar, Indo-Pacific, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Vietnam, Taiwan and organizations like USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Education:

No explicit funding levels for education were provided in the summary. The Department of Education funding may be contained in the missing "Division D" details.

Other Details:

- Extensions of programs like National Flood Insurance, immigration worker visas, cybersecurity authorities

- Changes to nuclear liability limits under Price-Anderson Act

- Reduction in authorized aviation passenger security fee collection

- Extension of federal spending sequester percentages

- Prohibition on funding UN Relief and Works Agency

Incredible job Claude

We pushed Claude3 to its limits—we parsed over 1000+ pages of a legal document and took what would have taken weeks to read ourselves parsed into a summarized paragraph above. The future is bright if technologies like this can finally give us transparency into how our government operates and functions. The data is out there and available for you to do the same and we hope we inspired you to take a closer look yourself next time. What should we tackle next? Until next time!