Who holds power, seat by seat, and who held it before.

The United States is not a tree.

A county sheriff does not report to the President. A school board does not report to a governor. The water district that bills your house answers to a board you have probably never heard of, elected by a few hundred people, and it can raise your rates without asking anyone above it. There are 90,837 separate governments in the United States — that is the Census Bureau's own count, from the 2022 Census of Governments — and only 537 offices in the entire country are federal: one President, one Vice President, 100 Senators, 435 Representatives.

The median American county is governed by 21 of those governments at once. Harris County, Texas, is governed by 569.

GovGlobe is the ledger of who holds every one of those seats, and who held it before. It starts at the top of the world — 195 countries, each with the building where its head of state actually sits, drawn — and descends: the federal apex in its statutory order of succession, all fifty states in their order of admission, every county, and the tens of thousands of school boards, fire districts and water authorities beneath them. Where we know who holds a seat, the record goes back as far as the sources do: every President since 1789, every Speaker, every Chief Justice, every governor. Where we do not, the map says so rather than filling it in.

How it is built

Every number on this site links to where it came from. The officeholders come from Wikidata's public-domain records, filtered to living and historical humans — the raw data lists fictional presidents, and we say so on the methodology page. The form of each country's government comes from the CIA World Factbook. Every American local government comes from the Census Bureau's own unit file, and the total on this site equals the Census total to the unit, because the build fails if it does not. Congress from 1789 comes from the public-domain biographical directory. Nothing here is estimated where it can be counted, and nothing is dated where the source did not date it.

What it is for

Most of the power that touches a person's life is local, uncounted, and never on the news. GovGlobe exists so that a curious person can see the whole board — the seat, the person in it, the people before them, and the authority that connects one seat to another — without taking anyone's word for it, including ours.

The globe above is the atlas. Every building on it is a real seat of power at its real coordinates, drawn far larger than life so you can find it. Click one.