How the Archive Works

A source-tiered public record of federal-government actions — every entry graded for how reliably it is sourced and whether it bears on democratic institutions.

What this is

The Trump Action Archive is a searchable record of actions taken by, or bearing directly on, the federal government — executive orders, agency rules and notices, court rulings, congressional acts, and the reporting that documents them. It is built from a week-by-week harvest and then curated into discrete events.

Every event carries two judgments made under fixed, written rules: how well it is sourced (its verification tier) and whether it is democracy-related (whether it bears on democratic institutions, the rule of law, civil rights and dissent, electoral integrity, checks and balances, or information integrity). An event that is both well-sourced and democracy-related is archive-grade — the set the public archive shows.

The two-tier source rule

Not every source can carry a claim on its own. The archive applies a single, consistent standard, adapted from the underlying chronicle’s two-tier source discipline. A source is either Tier 1 — the record, or Tier 2 — a surfacing.

Tier 1 — “the record”

A consequential claim may be carried by a Tier 1 source alone. There are four classes:

Tier 2 — “surfacings”

Analytical and accountability outlets. These may not enter the record on their own. But a Tier 2 event is admitted when it is independently corroborated by at least two distinct news desks — two separate newsrooms reporting the same thing carry it together where one could not.

Verification: three states

From the sourcing rule, every event resolves to exactly one verification state:

• Tier 1 · Primary
  Carried by the record. At least one Tier 1 primary source stands behind the event — a federal document, a court filing, a wire report, or a broadsheet news desk.
• Corroborated
  Carried by agreement. No single Tier 1 source, but two or more independent news desks report it — the multi-source corroboration threshold is met.
• Single source
  Not yet verified. A single, unverified surfacing. Retained and searchable, but held below the archive-grade line until corroboration or a primary record appears.

Democracy-relevance is decided positively

An event is included because there is a positive reason to call it democracy-related — never merely because nothing marked it otherwise. The determination runs in strict order, and the first rule that fires decides:

1. Resting on a primary record. Any event carried by a Tier 1 source — a federal, court, wire, or broadsheet record — is democracy-related by its nature. An executive order or a court ruling is a governmental act within scope; a missing analytic tag can never delete an authoritative record.
2. Carrying a named signal. Otherwise, if the event carries at least one named erosion trait or at least one attack tag, it is democracy-related.
3. A focused judgment. Otherwise, a single yes/no relevance test is applied and its reasoning recorded: does this action bear on democratic institutions, the rule of law, civil rights or dissent, electoral integrity, checks and balances, or information integrity?
4. A “no” is reviewed, never silently dropped. An event judged not relevant is excluded from the archive-grade set but kept, and — where it is also low-tier — routed to a bounded human-review list rather than deleted.

Traits are shown throughout by name only; the archive never displays trait numbers or weightings, and relevance is never decided by the absence of a trait.

Archive-grade

The two judgments combine into a single inclusion rule:

Of the 9,909 events retained across weeks 1–79, 6,762 meet both conditions and are shown in the public archive. The rest are held back — not because they are false, but because they have not yet cleared verification, relevance, or both.

Retain, don’t discard

Nothing is deleted. Every event the harvest produces is kept with its status attached — verified or not, relevant or not. An event below the line stays searchable in the full store and can be promoted later if a primary record surfaces, a second newsroom corroborates it, or a relevance review clears it. The public archive is a strict, high-confidence view onto a larger retained record, not the whole of it.

A living methodology

These rules are versioned and applied by machine so the same decision is made the same way every week, rather than re-argued case by case. The tier assignments for the established sources above — the federal record, the courts, the wires, the four broadsheets — are settled. Classification of the long tail of smaller and analytical outlets is ongoing: some sources are still being ruled, and the relevance test is periodically re-run as those rulings land. Where a classification is unsettled, the archive holds the event below the line rather than overstate its standing. Counts and rules on this page reflect the current published version and will move as the record grows and the specifications advance toward a frozen release.