The disclosure package

The clearest way to understand how fix bills work is to read the four-bill package on withheld files. It is the library's worked example, and each bill exists because the previous one is not enough.

Bill 1 — production duties on law enforcement

Law enforcement refuses with a statutory exemption. This bill puts a named official under a duty to produce by a date, narrows the exemption to a stated set of harms, and attaches a consequence to silence. It closes four of the seven root causes.

Bill 2 — production duties on the intelligence community

The intelligence community refuses differently: with a classification marking and the phrase sources and methods. A single statute drafted against both refusals would have to be vague about each, so this is a separate bill.

It does not abolish source protection. It narrows it to two things — a currently active human source whose life is at risk, and a collection method still in active use — and it makes the conclusions drawn from any protected source disclosable regardless. That last clause is the load-bearing one: we found nothing is the intelligence community's version of a denial, and it must be provable rather than asserted.

Bill 3 — the teams that do the work

Duties without staffing are duties nobody meets. This bill stands up the agency teams and gives them the clock.

Bill 4 — investigators who do not work for the agencies

Bills 1 through 3 still rely on the same institutions to report honestly about themselves. This is the check that does not: named civilians from outside those agencies, embedded inside them, with clearance, their own subpoena power, their own staff and IT — and the provision the whole design turns on, the right to publish what they find without any agency reviewing it first.

Why the package is not one bill

Each bill is enforceable on its own, so a partial win is still a win. And the gap is visible: two root causes are closed only by Bills 1 and 2, which is exactly what the coverage matrix shows.