About
Built to be useful. Designed to be trusted.
Mandate reads every bill on the House and Senate floor and explains it in plain English — with equal-weight arguments from supporters and opponents. This is who built it, why, and how we keep it nonpartisan.
Mission
We read every bill so you don't have to.
Most Americans want to know what Congress is doing. Almost nobody has time to read a 600-page bill.
Mandate fixes that. Every bill on the floor is summarized in plain English at an 8th-grade reading level. Every summary presents the strongest case for the bill alongside the strongest case against. Every vote is tracked back to your specific representatives so you know how they voted on the issues you care about.
We don't tell you what to think. We show you what they did.
Origin
A tool the founder wanted, that didn't exist.
Curtis Jackson built Mandate because he kept running into the same problem: when something passed through Congress, the coverage he could find was either too superficial to be useful or too partisan to be trusted. He wanted to know what a bill actually did, who it affected, and how his representatives voted — without first having to filter out the spin.
No product existed that did this well. So he built one.
Mandate is the result: a civic intelligence platform that treats the reader as an adult capable of forming their own opinions. We do the reading and the synthesis. You bring the judgment.
Nonpartisan
Structurally neutral, not just claimed neutral.
"Nonpartisan" is easy to say and hard to prove. We've built the commitment into how the product works.
- Equal-weight arguments. Every bill summary presents the strongest case for the bill and the strongest case against, written at equal length and equal tone.
- No editorial framing. We describe what a bill does and who it affects. We never say a bill is good or bad.
- Accountability, not advocacy. The Mandate Score measures whether your representatives showed up and engaged with the issues you care about. It does not measure their alignment with any party or position.
- No political donations accepted. Mandate accepts no political contributions and endorses no candidates, parties, or positions.
- News from across the spectrum, clearly labeled. We surface articles from sources with a wide range of editorial perspectives, each labeled with independent bias and reliability ratings.
The full mechanics live on the methodology page. The short version: every editorial choice has been made to keep political position out of the product's design.
Read the full methodology →Founder
Curtis Jackson
Founder
Curtis is a powertrain engineer at Ford Motor Company based in Detroit. The work taught him to take complicated systems apart, understand how each component contributes, and explain the result in language a non-engineer can follow. He built Mandate by applying the same discipline to federal legislation.
He is the sole founder and operator of Mandate. There is no investor cap table, no political donor list, no party affiliation guiding what gets built. The independence is the point.
If you want to reach him directly: curtis@mandateapp.org
How it works
The details, in one place.
The methodology page walks through how bills are summarized, how representatives are scored, how news bias is labeled, and where the data comes from.
Mandate is a product of Jackson's Golden Assets LLC, a Michigan limited liability company. We accept no political donations and endorse no candidates, positions, or parties.