With summer upon us, the 2025 legislative session has come to a close. A total of 828 new laws were passed, many of which will affect you and your family. As part of our BillBuddy service, we are offering several ways to discover what the new laws mean:

• Browse every single law passed this session, with a handy short summary, on our New Laws page. It’s a lot so if you don’t have hours to spend, we offer more abridged options…
• Browse a list of just the most important and impactful bills, which narrows the list down to about 100 bills. This lists uses our BillBuddy AI to determine which bills will affect the most people and/or have the highest impact on their lives or profession.
• Review new laws by your category of choice. Simply visit our New Laws page and choose a category from the Category drop down. For example, say you’re a worker and want to know about new laws that affect wages. Just choose “Business & Labor: Standards & Wages” and you’ll see the seven bills passed this year that relate to wages and how workers are treated with regard to compensation. It’s that easy!
• Lastly, and something we’re kind of excited about….stick around and we’ll be publishing an ongoing series all summer covering every bill that matters – what it does, who it helps, who it hurts, and much more.

This year we poured our heart and soul into the creation of and ongoing improvement of BillBuddy. BillBuddy has become a valuable resource to many Rhode Islanders to learn about new bills before they become law, and ultimately how new laws may affect you. Before I talk about the upcoming updates and improvements to the service, would you help us continue to build BillBuddy with a small donation? Uprise RI tries to avoid running ads and relies entirely on your generous donations to help create tools like BillBuddy and MoneyTrail*. Every donation is super important and it sends a powerful message: “I like what you’re doing. Please build more stuff like BillBuddy.” Thanks to everyone who has supported our efforts and thank you in advance to those reading this who contribute in the future.

Today we launched a new BillBuddy feature that we think you will love: documented changes to amended bills. Here’s how it works. Oftentimes, the General Assembly leadership approves of a bill’s general premise but they require some changes in order to get it passed. Updated versions of the bills are amended and released with a suffix (eg. H5408A). When these amended versions are introduced, you would normally have to read the entire bill text of each version and then figure out what changed. This can matter especially in cases like this year’s Minimum Wages bill, which saw a pretty major change in the final amended version. Today, we’ve added tabs to the Bill Text section for any bill that has been amended. They show the full bill text for each version of the bill, and most importantly: what has changed with each version, spelled out in plain language anyone can understand.

This new feature is all about transparency. Lobbyists work hard to help modify bills their clients do not approve of, and often these changes are never brought to light. Now, you are empowered with the exact details of how each bill has been tweaked. While we hoped to have had this feature ready prior to the close of the session, we are excited that Rhode Islanders will have this tool available starting right away in 2026.

Additionally, for 2026 we are adding the ability to ask questions about bills and receive an immediate, intelligent answer derived directly from the bill text. Last and most importantly, we are adding the ability to directly message your legislator about any bill you see, quickly and easily! Is that enough reason to make a donation? Still not convinced? OK, last but not least…

*We are in the process of building a whole new tool called MoneyTrail. With money pervading every inch of politics and holding outsize influence on what lawmakers do, it is more important than ever that we know who is donating to our local politicians so we can evaluate whether they are “bought” or doing right by their constituents. By this fall, we are hoping to introduce a tool that does exactly that. MoneyTrail will show Rhode Islanders who the top donors are to every legislator, both currently and in years past. We’ll also provide insights matching their votes to their donors, peeling away the layers of what your representatives are really up to, so you can make a sound decision at the ballot box.

We welcome your comments and feedback.