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Publish high-volume public rules as versioned, testable, machine-readable infrastructure so people, small businesses, agencies, auditors, and authorized agents can check eligibility, deadlines, permits, taxes, and compliance without guessing.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 6, 2026
Cited Sources
8
What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
The law is public in theory. In daily life, it often feels hidden behind PDFs, portals, phone queues, consultant memos, and contradictory agency pages. A family trying to keep a benefit, a small business trying to comply, a builder trying to get a permit, a patient trying to appeal a denial, and a civic technologist trying to build a helpful tool all face the same problem: the operational rulebook is hard to inspect.
The Innovation Party supports Law as an API. Public rules that govern high-volume services should be published in a form people and their authorized tools can test. Benefits eligibility, tax credits, permit requirements, grant rules, small-business compliance, prior-authorization deadlines, disclosure requirements, and appeal clocks should have official schemas, reference calculators, test cases, version histories, public change logs, and plain-language explanations.
Require agencies to publish machine-readable rule packages for high-volume public obligations and services: eligibility, deadlines, required evidence, filing paths, appeal rights, permit criteria, tax-credit checks, and compliance duties.
Keep the enacted statute and regulation legally authoritative. The machine-readable layer should be an official operational implementation, with plain-language notes about where judgment, exceptions, or case-by-case discretion remain.
Publish public test suites: synthetic households, businesses, projects, patients, employers, and edge cases that show how the rule works and where it does not decide the answer.
Maintain versioned rule APIs, public diffs, effective dates, deprecation schedules, and archival access so people can see which rule applied at the time of a decision.
Create safe-harbor simulators where statute permits: if a person or small business gives accurate facts and follows the agency's current official calculator, penalties should be mitigated or reliance should count in their favor.
Let third-party tools, citizen agents, legal aid, benefits navigators, tax software, compliance tools, and researchers certify against public conformance tests instead of reverse-engineering agency portals.
Require every automated denial or compliance flag based on a machine-readable rule to show the rule path, facts used, missing evidence, deadline, and appeal route.
Fund shared open-source components so small agencies, states, tribes, local governments, and public-interest organizations can publish rules without hiring a bespoke vendor for each program.
This does not replace law with code. It makes law easier to use and harder to hide. A statute can still require judgment. A hearing officer can still consider facts. A court can still interpret ambiguity. But when a rule is already being operationalized inside agency software, private vendors, spreadsheets, call-center scripts, or denial systems, the public deserves to see and test the operational version.
This is the missing substrate for citizen power. A right to send your agent means little if the agent can only scrape webpages and guess. Verified-once public services need reusable facts and testable rules. The Time Ledger needs burden data tied to the exact step that wastes hours. Small businesses need a public compliance path that is cheaper than hiring a specialist for every threshold question. Law as an API turns the rulebook into public infrastructure.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.