What has moved through PLAN, counted.
This page is the accountability surface for the Public Lands Action Network: what the tool is built to do, what has moved through it since launch on July 9, 2026, and how to check the numbers. Every figure below is a live count from the same database the tool runs on. Nothing is estimated.
Figures as of September 25, 2026 · zero paid promotion since launch
The theory of change
Issue preservation at scale.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an agency finalizing a decision must consider and respond to substantive comments. Identical form letters get bundled and counted once; they preserve nothing. A specific comment that cites the record, the environmental assessment’s own section and page, creates the agency’s duty to respond and enters the record that a later objection or lawsuit stands on.
So PLAN does not collect signatures. It reads the government’s own documents and marks the holes: the contradiction on page 46, the impact the appendix concedes and the summary omits. The reader writes the sentence themselves, in their own words, with the citation in hand. The handoff then goes to the official docket, and the comment is filed in the reader’s own name. PLAN never files anything.
The handoff ledger
A handoff is the moment PLAN sends a reader to the government’s own comment system. The ledger is anonymous by design: one event per person per fight and channel, no account, no email, no IP address stored. It counts people sent to official dockets, not clicks.
Alongside the handoffs: 106 watch signups for fights that are locked in but not yet open for comment, 50 of them confirmed by double opt-in. All of it with zero paid promotion; readers arrived through More Than Just Parks’ own channels and search.
Covered systems
PLAN ingests open comment windows daily from five federal systems, including agency project registers whose windows never reach the Federal Register at all. Open actions on the board right now, by source system:
The honest edge: Bureau of Reclamation decisions, Fish and Wildlife refuge planning, and BOEM reach the board today only when they publish to the Federal Register. Direct coverage of those registers is expanding; until it lands, they are incidental catches and we say so.
The document harvest
For 39 of the 40 open actions, PLAN has read the underlying environmental assessment or impact statement itself, not just the notice. Each read produces findings with section-and-page citations to the agency’s own document, and every quoted passage passes a verification gate that rejects anything that is not one contiguous verbatim run from the document text. Stitched quotes, paraphrases, and fabricated tails do not publish.
The remainder is stated, not hidden. 0 more documents were read end to end but no finding survived the verification gate, so those pages stay blurb-only rather than publish anything unverifiable. 0 actions have no public decision document yet; the notice is the only record so far. 0 have a document PLAN cannot retrieve yet (oversize files or HTML-only notices). 1 arrived since the last harvest pass and have not been probed yet. Every action shows the agency's notice and the official links either way.
How to check our work
The methodology is public.
Where actions come from, what gets cut, and the lines we will not cross: the PLAN methodology page. Every action links its official source document.
Accuracy validators run in CI against the live board.
Automated validators assert, on the live open actions: every action carries an official source link; no drafted talking point asserts a first-person fact on the reader’s behalf; no raw template token can reach a citizen; every row names a known source system. A hard failure blocks, loudly.
Deadline moves are recorded, never silently corrected.
When an agency extends or shortens a comment window, the move lands in a drift ledger with the old date, the new date, and the source. 13 moves recorded to date. A silent correction would erase the only evidence our date was ever wrong.
One decision is one fight.
The same decision often arrives from two source systems. Cross-source duplicates are recorded and pointed at one canonical page; both records survive with their own provenance, so nothing on the board is double counted.