About Breakdown

Our mission

Congress works for you — but following what it actually does shouldn't require a law degree or hours of free time. Breakdown exists to close that gap: we turn real legislation into plain language, let you vote on the same bills your representatives vote on, and show you — with a simple agreement score — whether the people elected to represent you actually do.

We believe civic participation should be free, private, and nonpartisan. Breakdown never tells you what to think, never sells your data, and never takes money from parties, campaigns, or special interests.

The story

Breakdown was founded by Ryan Oillataguerre, a software engineer who spent eight years deliberately working toward building it — learning to build products and infrastructure with one goal in mind: making it genuinely easy for ordinary people to hold their representatives accountable.

The problem he kept coming back to is simple to state and hard to solve. The information is all public — every bill, every roll call, every sponsor — but it's scattered, dense, and written for insiders. Most people don't disengage from politics because they don't care; they disengage because the system is exhausting to follow. News coverage tells you what to feel about Congress. Almost nothing shows you, plainly, what Congress did.

So Breakdown does exactly that. It was built as a nonprofit from day one, because an app whose job is telling you the truth about your government can't answer to advertisers or investors — only to its users.

The organization

Our legislative data comes directly from official government sources like Congress.gov, and our methodology — from AI summaries to agreement scores — is documented openly on our transparency page. If you'd like to support the mission, every donation is tax-deductible — see our donate page.