Monitoring democratic institutions through public records
About Democracy Monitor
The shift in how America governs itself is happening. It is visible in the government's own records. You can see exactly where.
That is the whole claim of this site. Everything else here exists so you can check it.
The news and commentary are full of warnings about the decline of democracy in America and the rise of authoritarianism. This site does not take a stand on that question. What it does instead is narrower, and checkable: it reads what the government says about itself — executive orders, Federal Register rules, court opinions, agency press releases, inspector-general reports, congressional records — and asks whether those documents show departures from the historical norms of U.S. democracy. The same methodology is applied to every administration, and every assessment links to the documents behind it.
The half-life of news touching on democracy is now measured in hours. Some of what is changing took two and a half centuries to build and may not be rebuildable on any timeline that matters to the people alive now. This site is the record of what stood before.
“I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.”
Whether erosion of democracy in America is underway is not this site's call to make — it is for the American people to decide, from the evidence, which is all public and all downloadable.
How to catch us
The lens — every choice we made before reading a single document: the categories, the baseline years, the models, the exact prompt versions.
Self-tests — what happens when we test ourselves: the swap audit, the era rates side by side, and the readings read by people who are not us.
Reversals — every time we published something wrong and changed it, with dates and evidence.
Limitations — what this system cannot see, in our own words.
If you think a specific reading is wrong, say so on the document itself — every reviewed document carries a “dispute this reading” link. Disputes are published once reviewed, and when one changes a reading, the change goes in the ledger with the objection attached.
Who is behind this
Democracy Monitor is built and run by one person, Michael Kelly, a semi-retired software engineer, as a project of Agile Explorations LLC — a one-person software company. It is not backed by a party, a campaign, or an advocacy organization, and has no staff, no client, and no outside funding; the costs are paid by the company, and the Support page is where readers can offset them. The code, the methodology, and the data are all open — read the source, download the data, check the work, and tell me where it's wrong.