Last updated: April 26, 2026

The short version

Rigged Deck is a free, public-interest visualization of the U.S. Congress hosted at riggeddeck.com. The site does not use cookies, does not run third-party trackers, does not place advertisements, and does not sell or share user data with anyone. Visiting the site does not require a login, and we do not collect names, email addresses, or any other personal information.

What we do collect

The hosting provider (Netlify) records standard server logs that include the requesting IP address, the requested URL, the HTTP user-agent, and the timestamp. These logs are used solely for operational diagnostics (uptime, error rates, bandwidth) and are retained according to the hosting provider's default retention. We do not export, analyze, or correlate these logs with any other dataset.

The site loads two public CDNs at page load:

  • Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com) for the Inter and JetBrains Mono typefaces.

These requests are governed by the respective providers' privacy policies. No cookies are set by Rigged Deck itself.

The site footer includes an outbound link to buymeacoffee.com/riggeddeck so visitors can voluntarily contribute to hosting and data-licensing costs. No Buy Me a Coffee tracking script or widget is loaded on Rigged Deck — only a plain hyperlink. If you click through, your activity on Buy Me a Coffee is governed by their own privacy policy.

Cloudflare Web Analytics

The main visualization page (this page's parent at /) loads a single privacy-respecting analytics beacon from Cloudflare. This privacy page and the terms page do not load it — the beacon is only present on the main visualization.

Cloudflare Web Analytics, by design, does not:

  • set any cookies;
  • store visitor IP addresses;
  • fingerprint browsers or devices;
  • track visitors across sites.

What it does record, in aggregate only: page views, the referring page, the visitor's country (country-level — not city or coordinates), the user-agent string, and basic page-load timing for performance metrics. The operator of Rigged Deck uses this purely to understand traffic volume and where readers are coming from. Cloudflare's privacy commitments for this product are at blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-first-web-analytics.

The beacon script itself is loaded from static.cloudflareinsights.com and is permitted by the page's Content Security Policy. You can verify this in your browser's DevTools Network tab — the request is named beacon.min.js.

Cookies and local storage

Rigged Deck does not set first-party cookies and does not write to localStorage, sessionStorage, or IndexedDB. There is nothing to clear or opt out of.

Where the data on this site comes from

All data displayed on Rigged Deck is sourced from public records or properly licensed APIs. We have not scraped, intercepted, or otherwise obtained data through means that violate any source's terms of service.

Congress (Senate & House)

  • Member roster, biographical data, and committee assignments. Sourced from the public-domain unitedstates/congress-legislators project (CC0 license) and from Bioguide.congress.gov.
  • Statutory salary figures. From the Congressional Research Service report R97-1011, a public legislative-branch document.
  • Legal-benefits comparison. The "Legal benefits" panel below the net-worth bars compares workplace, safety, and transparency laws as they apply to private-sector workers vs. members of Congress / Hill staff. Each row cites the underlying statute or the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (the body the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 created to handle Hill-staff workplace claims). Statutes covered include the Whistleblower Protection Act (5 USC § 2302), OSHA (29 USC §§ 651–678), the WARN Act (29 USC § 2101 et seq.), federal collective bargaining (5 USC Ch. 71), ADA / ADEA (42 USC § 12101 / 29 USC § 621), FOIA (5 USC § 552), the Privacy Act (5 USC § 552a), the Speech or Debate Clause (Const. art. I § 6 cl. 1), and the STOCK Act (Pub. L. 112-105).
  • Codified Congressional benefits beyond salary. The "benefits" stacked bar in the wealth section uses annual-value figures from primary federal sources: CRS RL30631 (FERS pension formula and accrual rates), TSP / FERS rules (5% federal-match defined-contribution benefit), CRS RS22893 (Office of the Attending Physician on-site medical service), OPM FEHB premium tables (federal-employee health-plan taxpayer share), OPM FEGLI premium tables (life-insurance taxpayer share), and 26 USC §162(a)(2) + Architect of the Capitol records (DC living-expense deduction, DCA parking, gym). The avg-American comparison row uses KFF's Employer Health Benefits Survey 2023 for typical employer-paid premium share. Each segment in the bar links to its source on hover.
  • Net-worth estimates and disclosed stock trades. Provided by Quiver Quantitative under a paid API license. Quiver, in turn, aggregates from House and Senate financial-disclosure filings, which are public records.
  • Lobbying activity. Also sourced via Quiver Quantitative, derived from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database, which is public.
  • Federal contracts awarded to publicly-traded companies. Sourced via Quiver Quantitative, which aggregates from the U.S. federal contract awards reported on USAspending.gov (public taxpayer-funded records).
  • Documented ethics & misconduct. Sourced from the public-domain GovTrack misconduct database, a hand-curated record of allegations and committee actions where every entry cites the underlying news report or committee filing. Allegations are presented as documented by GovTrack, not as findings of guilt.
  • Active legislation (sponsored bills, cosponsorship totals). The "Active legislation" section in each member drawer is sourced from the Congress.gov developer API (Library of Congress / Government Publishing Office). Bill rows link directly to the matching record on Congress.gov for the full text and action history. We cache the most recent activity per member; the underlying public record on Congress.gov is authoritative.
  • Editorial net-worth cross-checks. Selected high-profile members are cross-referenced against published reporting from Business Insider, OpenSecrets, and similar journalism, with each figure citing its source URL inline.
  • Average-American baseline figures. The $192,700 median household net worth figure comes from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (2022); the $80,610 median household income figure comes from the U.S. Census ACS 2023.
  • Social media handles. Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube handles are taken from legislators-social-media.yaml in the unitedstates project, and are public official accounts. We do not embed live posts and do not call any social-media API at runtime.

Governors (state scorecards)

The governors panel shows state-level outcome data for each governor's tenure window, alongside a comparable prior window and the U.S. national average over the same window. Every figure on the scorecard cites its originating federal statistical agency or licensed dataset, with a direct link beside the number.

Personal financial disclosures, stock holdings, and lobbying ties for governors are not aggregated on this site. State-level disclosure regimes vary too much for a uniform aggregation to be honest, and a sparse aggregation would be worse than none.

Where a record has not yet been ingested, the visualization explicitly says so (e.g., "No public disclosure available for this member yet") rather than displaying a fabricated value. We do not generate, estimate, or invent financial, voting, ethics, or trade data.

Children

Rigged Deck is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect any information from them. Because the site collects no personal information from any visitor, this is largely moot.

Changes

If this policy materially changes, the "Last updated" date at the top of this page will be revised and a brief note will be posted on the site.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or takedown requests for any displayed record: [email protected].