eCFR Project

Purpose

The United States Federal Government has over 200,000 pages of federal regulations across ~150 main agencies, all of which can be found within the eCFR at https://www.ecfr.gov/. There is a public API for it. The goal of this project is to create a website to analyze Federal Regulations to allow for more digestible and actionable insights to be made on potential deregulation efforts across the government.

What This Project Implements

• Data ingestion from the eCFR API and storage in a local SQLite database and gzip-compressed XML snapshots.
• API endpoints for agencies, metrics, and refresh state.
• UI for reviewing agency metrics.
• Metrics implemented:
  • word_count (per agency)
  • words_per_chapter (per agency)
  • checksum (per agency)
  • readability (Flesch Reading Ease)
  • churn (custom metric): ratio of agency-referenced chapters whose content changed compared to the previous snapshot, best-effort based on available prior data.

Local Setup

Prerequisites

• Go 1.25.6

Install Dependencies

go mod tidy

Build and Run the Server (and Website)

The server also serves the static website from ecfr-analytics/web.

cd ecfr-analytics
go build ./cmd/server
go run ./cmd/server

By default it listens on http://localhost:8080.

Notes on First Run

• The server will kick off a background refresh on startup and then refresh daily.
• The initial download can take several minutes depending on network speed.
• Data is stored under ecfr-analytics/data.

Screenshots

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License

Released under the MIT License. © 2026 SarahUniverse