Your representatives’ words
belong to you.
Every member of Congress, every candidate, and the President now speak to the public through a handful of private platforms. Those platforms decide what you see, when you see it, and what it costs. We believe the public speech of public officials is a public record. This page explains why WhosMyRep.org exists, what Congress has and has not done about it, and asks where you stand.
Imagine a financial system where company filings are sold to the highest bidder, or reach the public only if an algorithm judges them popular enough. That is how our politicians now speak to us. American democracy will not survive a government that speaks to its people through algorithms controlled by billionaires, whose interests are not aligned with those of the American people.
Congress guaranteed free, equal access to what companies say in 1990. In 2026, when every government official uses X, Facebook, or Instagram as their primary means of communication, we have nothing. The law needs to adapt.
When a public company has news that could move its stock, federal law is precise about what happens next. Quarterly and annual reports go to the Securities and Exchange Commission on a fixed calendar, and anything material that happens in between, a merger, a CEO’s departure, a lost contract, must be reported on a Form 8-K within four business days. Anyone in the world can read those filings the moment they post, for free, on a government website called EDGAR. Congress wrote EDGAR into the securities laws in 1990; every filing has been free online since 1995, and it stays there permanently. A second rule governs what executives say out loud: if they share material information with anyone outside the company, an analyst, a fund, a favored reporter, Regulation FD requires them to release it to everyone at the same moment. Congress and the SEC built this system because a company’s words move money, and the country decided that no one should get to buy those words early or be charged to read them.
Now consider the words of the people who govern. A post from the President moves markets more than any CEO’s. A post from your Representative tells you how they will vote, what they believe, and what they are asking of you. None of it is filed anywhere. It lives on whichever private platform the official chose, and that platform decides the terms: one sells the President’s posts to traders milliseconds early for $100,000 a month, one charges half a cent every time a program reads a Senator’s post, one offers no way to read a Member’s posts in bulk at any price. The same post can be a federal record under the Presidential Records Act, evidence in a federal courtroom, and a paid product, all at once.
That is the discrepancy this page is about. It is not a partisan claim. It applies to the current President and to the next one, and to every member of both parties. The question is only whether the words of public officials should get the floor we gave corporate speech thirty years ago.
| The same question, twice | Corporate speech · what a company says | Government speech · what your officials say |
|---|---|---|
| Where does it live? | On a government website, EDGAR, run by the SEC since the 1990s. | On whichever private platform the official picked: Truth Social, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. |
| What does it cost to read? | $0, for anyone, including software. | Whatever the platform charges: $100,000 a month for early access, $0.005 per post by software, or no access at all. |
| Who gets it first? | Everyone at once. Telling insiders first has been illegal since 2000 (Regulation FD). | Whoever pays. Nearly a dozen financial firms receive the President’s posts before the public. |
| Is there a permanent record? | Yes. Every filing, forever, in one archive. | No. A deleted post is gone unless someone saved it. The public archive of deleted politicians’ posts, Politwoops, was killed twice by X’s API changes. |
| Can you see if it was hidden or boosted? | Nothing to hide. A filing is a filing. | No. The platform’s algorithm decides who sees a post, and no independent record exists of throttling or amplification. |
| Who enforces it? | The SEC, with fines and prosecution. | No one. The two bills in Congress would ban selling speed and leave everything else to the platforms. |
Corporate column: SEC, EDGAR history and Regulation FD (17 CFR 243). Government column: NPR (Aug 1, 2026), Fortune (Aug 12, 2026), X developer pricing page (Sep 8, 2026), Meta Content Library terms, S. 5223 §4(a)(2)(B) and (D).
The whole government moved onto social media. The law stayed behind.
On July 16, 2026, the company that owns Truth Social announced a product it called Truth API: a licensed, real-time feed of posts from the platform’s highest-ranking accounts, delivered to paying financial firms “in milliseconds,” before the rest of the public sees them. It went live August 1. NPR reported the price at up to $100,000 a month. The company’s own quarterly filing describes it as a way “to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The President holds roughly 41 percent of that company through a trust.
That sale made the news because it was loud. The arrangement underneath it is not new. For three years X has charged by the post to read any Senator’s feed through its software interface. Meta offers no public feed for a Representative’s Facebook or Instagram posts at all; the research library that replaced its old monitoring tool in 2024 is open only to academic and nonprofit institutions. Whether you can see what your representatives said, and when, has been a commercial decision for some time. Truth Social simply posted the price.
Congress answered with two bills. Both are worth passing, and both accept the premise underneath the scandal: that private companies own the distribution of official speech, and the job of the law is to police how they sell it. Neither bill requires the words of a public official to be available anywhere except on the platform, at the platform’s price, in the order the platform’s algorithm chooses.
Two bills, four sponsors, and exactly where each one stops
Each bill has a Senate and a House version with identical text. We read all four. Both bills prohibit; neither provides.
| Bill | Who it covers | What it bans | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| S. 5223 / H.R. 10125 NO PROFIT ActSen. Warner (D-VA), Aug 3 · Rep. Himes (D-CT), Aug 20 |
The President, Vice President, every member of Congress, congressional and executive staff, judges, and their families, for 180 days after leaving office. Personal accounts count if used to speak to the public. | Trading on an official’s post obtained through “prioritized access” before ordinary users can see it. Platforms selling that access. Penalty for the platform: the revenue it earned. | Section 4(a)(2)(D) expressly preserves a platform’s right to sell API and data-licensing access to an official’s posts, so long as every paying customer is charged alike and none gets them early. Charging for speed is banned. Charging for access is written into law. Algorithmic ranking is exempted by name, with no disclosure duty. |
| S. 5221 / H.R. 10066 Stop Corrupt Trading ActSen. Padilla (D-CA), Aug 3 · Rep. Salinas (D-OR), Aug 6 |
The President and Vice President only, plus any company they control or own at least 5 percent of. | A covered person selling “nonpublic information” for money, and anyone buying it. Criminal penalties, forfeiture, and civil disgorgement. | Reaches Trump Media because the President owns it. Does not reach any other platform, any member of Congress, or any candidate. Its “equal terms” test permits a uniform paywall. Nothing on access, archives, or what platforms do to a post after it is published. |
Also pending: a First Amendment lawsuit by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation against the President and the Executive Office of the President (S.D.N.Y., No. 1:26-cv-6867), asking the court to bar the practice of posting official information exclusively behind a paid feed. Oral argument on the preliminary injunction is set for October 7, 2026. If the plaintiffs win, one official would be ordered to publish somewhere the public can reach for free, for as long as the order lasts. The other 535 are not before the court.
Treat official speech as a public record from the moment it is made
The fix is affirmative, not punitive. The public communications of federal officials and candidates should be guaranteed to be:
No paywall, subscription, or license between a citizen and an official’s public words.
Everyone gets the words at the same moment. No speed tiers, no paid early access. The rule the stock market has had since 2000.
The record comes from the official’s own account and site, so you can tell the real words from a forgery or an AI fabrication.
A documented format any newsroom, civic site, or citizen’s software can read, as a right rather than at a platform’s sufferance.
Every post, edit, and deletion kept, along with any action a platform takes on it, so manipulation can be seen from either side of the screen.
Every official and candidate clicks “allow” once on each platform they use, the same permission any scheduling app asks for. From then on, every post lands on their official .gov page and in a public archive the instant it publishes, with its metrics, its edits, and its deletions. Platforms already run this exact consent flow for their own developers. Nothing new has to be built. They have to stop withholding it. Once the feed is free and simultaneous on a public site, there is nothing faster left to sell, and the market for a Truth API disappears without anyone having to prove a trade.
The precedent is EDGAR and Regulation FD. Before 1994, corporate filings were paper sold by intermediaries; EDGAR made them a free public feed and the SEC took over running it. In 2000, Regulation FD made it illegal for a company to tell Wall Street before telling the public. Together they are exactly the floor described above, built for corporate speech a generation ago. No equivalent exists for the speech of the people who govern.
Who in Congress has said anything
Twenty-one members of Congress posted about the Truth API on X in the eight weeks after it was announced. Every one is a Democrat. The largest reach came from Sen. Chris Murphy (about 974,000 impressions), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (696,000), Sen. Chuck Schumer (251,000), Sen. Adam Schiff (132,000), and Sen. Cory Booker (112,000). Rep. Andrea Salinas posted most often, fourteen times. No Republican member has posted about it. Four Republican senators criticized it in hallway interviews the week it was announced, and none has cosponsored either bill.
“I think that’s wrong. It’s a form of buying access.”
“That does not sound appropriate.”
The President is “not in a position to use the position to enhance your own personal wealth.”
“It just doesn’t make sense to me on its face.”
A bill that makes the record free would bind a Democratic president exactly as it binds this one, and every member of Congress in both parties the same way. That is what makes it a transparency bill rather than a bill about one man.
We believe your representatives’ words belong to you
WhosMyRep.org collects what every member of Congress says in public, every day, alongside how they vote and who funds them, and puts it in one place where no algorithm decides what you see. We pay X by the post to do it, because that is the only way the public record of Congress can be read by software today. We bring it to you free.
That bill should be zero, for everyone. Until it is, this site is the working prototype of the record we think the law should guarantee: free, simultaneous, authenticated, machine-readable, and preserved. Our founder wrote the affirmative proposal above and is carrying it to members of Congress. If you agree, the poll at the top of this page is where you say so, and following the issue is how you find out who in Congress moves.
Bill descriptions are read from the introduced texts of S. 5223, H.R. 10125, S. 5221, and H.R. 10066 on Congress.gov, not from press releases; section citations refer to those texts. Truth API pricing: NPR, Aug 1, 2026; subscriber count: Fortune, Aug 12, 2026; product description and launch date: Trump Media & Technology Group press release (Jul 16, 2026) and Form 8-K exhibit for Q2 2026; ownership share: the Warren–Schiff letter to the SEC (Jul 28) and the Raskin letter to TMTG (Jul 30). X pricing: X developer pricing page, read Sep 8, 2026. Meta eligibility: Meta Content Library terms. EDGAR and Regulation FD: SEC. Lawsuit status: S.D.N.Y. docket via CourtListener, Sep 8, 2026. Member post counts and impressions come from WhosMyRep.org’s archive of members’ official X accounts, Jul 10 – Sep 8, 2026; Republican senators’ remarks are as quoted by The Hill and Bloomberg and collected by Variety and TheWrap, Jul 23, 2026. Every source document is held in our issue file and available on request. The proposal in “What we believe should happen” is WhosMyRep.org’s own position; everything else on this page is reporting.