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Executive orders — White House, Federal Register, accountability reports

How executive orders are ingested, linked to the Federal Register, and analyzed for CFA accountability reporting.

Scope

Executive orders are published first on the White House site, then in the Federal Register. The FederalRegister project ingests both, links records where possible, and generates accountability analysis suitable for export to CFA.

White House (primary publication)

Discovery: RSS feed for presidential actions / executive orders.
Storage: Database records with source whitehouse_executive_orders.
Full text: Extracted from each order’s canonical detail page (HTML main content); there is typically no PDF in the feed path described in the pipeline documentation.

Federal Register (subsequent publication)

Filter: Presidential documents typed as executive orders via the Federal Register API.
Linking: Backfill scripts can set Federal Register document_number on White House rows by matching publication date and title, producing stable links to https://www.federalregister.gov/d/{document_number}.

Accountability analysis (watchdog reports)

A structured analysis is generated per White House executive order (authority, mandates, deadlines, fiscal and contractor implications, transparency, risk scoring). Results are stored in the database and exported as **output/executive_order_accountability_report.json** for sync into CFA (Executive Orders stream).

Export command (FederalRegister): python scripts/run_report.py produces aggregated outputs including the executive order accountability bundle.

CFA sync: From the CFA repo, run ./scripts/sync-executive-order-accountability-report.sh (or equivalent copy) so /executive-order-accountability reflects current data.

Operational commands (FederalRegister)

See the FederalRegister repository for authoritative scripts:

White House sync: python scripts/run_external_pdf_sync.py
Optional FR link backfill: python scripts/backfill_executive_order_fr_links.py
Analysis batch: python scripts/run_executive_order_accountability_analysis.py
Field re-parse (no LLM): python scripts/backfill_executive_order_accountability_fields.py
Full report export: python scripts/run_report.py

Source

Adapted from FederalRegister/docs/EXECUTIVE_ORDERS_WH_AND_FR.md.