What PolicyDrift Is

PolicyDrift is a research tool for tracking how U.S. federal policy documents change over time, including executive orders, public laws, regulations, and related authorities. It maintains a versioned record of source text and makes amendments easier to review through redline comparisons and concise analyst notes.

How It Works

PolicyDrift collects documents from official government sources, including govinfo.gov, federalregister.gov, and congress.gov. Users can also upload official text directly when an API version is unavailable or when working with a specific section of a document. Each version is normalized and deduplicated to avoid storing unchanged text repeatedly.

Documents are compared using text diffs. The platform identifies additions, deletions, and structural revisions, including moved sections or reorganized paragraphs, so changes can be reviewed without rereading an entire document. PolicyDrift is intended for research and educational use.

Who built it

Built by Abigail Camp, a junior at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service studying International Politics with a concentration in Security Studies and a minor in Journalism. Her research focuses on European security, Russian foreign policy, and the sanctions regimes that shape both.