What's new on Citizen Portal
A big release with a new home page, a ton of new topic pages, topic following, favorites, and a smarter search bar.
Hi, this is an update from the Citizen Portal team. We just launched a new version of the website with a suite of features we're excited to share with you. Here's a quick walkthrough of the changes.
A new home page
Click the Home button in the sidebar (or the logo) to land on our brand new home page. It pulls together the most important things in one place: the latest top stories, the feeds and topics you follow, and easy ways to discover new ones.
Premium users will see a Discover Topics section right in the middle of the home page. It surfaces popular topics personalized to your area, and a Browse by Category section that organizes a ton of topics into 32 government domains. Click any category to see its most recent coverage on a dedicated page.
At the bottom of the home page is the new Explore section, an expanded version of the Explore button you already know. The button itself has moved up to the top of the page so you can find it more easily. The new section gives it more room to breathe with tabs for any state, federal agency, international body, or US territory, and the interactive heat map at the top.
Saved locations are now Following
Location saving has been upgraded into a full Following system. Across the whole website you can now follow any feed and immediately access it from your sidebar. Just click the new Follow button to see for yourself.
If you were already saving locations, your existing ones have been carried over automatically. You'll find them waiting in the Feeds section of your sidebar.
National
Premium: launch of new topic pages
This is one of the biggest changes in the release. Topic pages didn't exist before. Now they do, and there are a ton of them.
Every topic our system has ever tagged on an article now has a dedicated page that pulls together every article tagged with that topic across federal, state, and local government. "Nuclear Energy", "Water Rights", "Cybersecurity", "Affordable Housing" — they're all there, and they all have a Follow button at the top so premium members can keep up with them.
Try it yourself. Type a topic into the search bar, and if you see it pop up under Topics, click it. You'll land on the dedicated page for that topic. Use the Location filter on the page to narrow it to a specific city, county, or state.
Nuclear Energy
Articles tagged nuclear energy from federal, state, and local government meetings across the U.S.
A new sidebar
You'll notice that there's a new sidebar on the left. Home takes you to the home page. Topics shows everything you follow that's a topic. Feeds shows everything you follow that's a location. Favorites is where saved articles live.
The buttons stay there as you browse, so your saved stuff is always one click away no matter what page you're on.
A smarter search bar
The search bar now automatically adjusts itself to prioritize your current location, which you can see reflected in the chip on the left.
Open the dropdown to freely adjust it. Pick All to keep its global scope, or pick a specific location to filter by. The choice is yours.
Favorite any article
Is there an article you want to hold onto, or wish you could share with a friend? Now you can favorite articles by pressing the heart icon. They'll be saved to the Favorites section in the sidebar for later, and they sync across devices automatically.
Federal › Federal Reserve System
Panel urges regulators to revive de novo community bank charters
A panel of community banking experts called on federal regulators to make it easier to charter new community banks, arguing that the steep decline in de novo charters has contributed to consolidation and reduced access to credit in underserved areas.
Apr 9, 2026
Articles or Data, your pick
Following pages have two tabs: Articles and Data. Articles is every bit of news tied to that feed. Data pulls together everything else we know about it into one structured view: spending highlights, key fiscal exposures, the elected officials, a 90-day topic breakdown, location info, and more.
Following pages, refreshed
Following pages keep all the functionality you expected, plus some new tricks.
There's now a unified Filters dropdown for both desktop and mobile. Use it to narrow your results by data level, by topic, or by keyword (premium users).
The topic filter goes one step further. You can follow topics directly from the dropdown, and the topics shown are pre-filtered to the location you're currently viewing. You can also search for additional locations or remove ones you no longer want to see.
Filters
Thanks for reading
That's the brief tour of the new features. There's a lot more on the way, with exciting updates coming in future releases, and we hope you'll stick around with us.
But that's everything for today. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us, the feedback button is always on the bottom right ready for you.