Congress.gov Records

Browse and retrieve U.S. legislative bill data from Congress.gov. Discover bills by filtering on congress, bill type, and date range — there is no keyword search. Use 'list' to browse (requires congress, defaults to most-recently-updated first), 'get' for full bill detail (sponsor, policy area, CBO estimates, law info), or drill into a specific bill with 'actions', 'amendments', 'cosponsors', 'committees', 'subjects', 'summaries', 'text', 'titles', or 'related' (each requires congress + billType + billNumber).

Browse recent CRS (Congressional Research Service) bill summaries — plain-language summaries of bills at each legislative stage, useful for answering "what's happening in Congress?". The fromDateTime/toDateTime filters apply to the summary's update time, not the bill's action date, so results include recently rewritten summaries of older bills. Defaults to summaries updated in the last 7 days. Each item shows both the bill's action date and the summary update date. For summaries of one specific bill, use congressgov_bill_lookup with operation='summaries' instead.

Browse congressional committees and their legislation, reports, and nominations. Committee codes follow the pattern chamber-prefix (h/s/j) + abbreviation + 2-digit number — use 'list' (with optional 'filter' for name→code resolution) to discover codes, then 'get' or drill into 'bills', 'reports', or 'nominations' ('nominations' is Senate-only). 'get' and sub-resources only need committeeCode (chamber is inferred from the prefix); pass chamber explicitly to override. The 'bills' sub-resource defaults to 'recent' order (newest update-date first); pass order='oldest' for ascending update-date order. Upstream omits bill titles from the 'bills' sub-resource — rows carry only {congress, billType, billNumber, actionDate, relationshipType, url}; chain 'congressgov_bill_lookup get' per row to retrieve titles and policy area.

Browse and retrieve committee reports from Congress.gov — reports accompany legislation reported out of committee and explain the bill's purpose, committee amendments, dissenting views, and the committee vote. Report types are 'hrpt' (House), 'srpt' (Senate), and 'erpt' (Executive).

Browse and retrieve CRS (Congressional Research Service) reports — nonpartisan policy analyses by subject-matter experts at the Library of Congress, covering policy areas, legislative proposals, and legal questions. Report IDs use letter-number codes (e.g., R40097, RL33612, IF12345). Use 'list' to browse available reports or 'get' for full detail (authors, topics, summary, download formats).

Browse the daily Congressional Record — floor speeches, debates, and legislative text published each day Congress is in session. Navigation is hierarchical: volumes (via 'list') → issues (via 'issues') → articles (via 'articles'). Use 'list' to find recent volumes, 'issues' to see what's in a volume, and 'articles' to access individual speeches and debate sections.

Browse enacted public and private laws from Congress.gov by congress and law type ('pub' for public laws, 'priv' for private). 'list' filters by enactment status and law type — the discovery path 'bill_lookup' does not offer. 'get' returns the origin bill record (sponsor, actions, summaries, text), with the public/private law citation on the bill's 'laws' array (e.g. {"number":"118-2","type":"Public Law"}).

Discover congressional members and their legislative activity. No name search. For 'list', filter by stateCode (optionally with district), by congress, or by both together (e.g., 118th Congress + CA, or CA district 12 in the 118th). Add currentMember=true to restrict to currently serving members. Once you have a bioguideId, use 'get' for full profile or 'sponsored'/'cosponsored' for their legislative portfolio.

Retrieve U.S. congressional roll call votes and individual member voting positions for either chamber. Set 'chamber' to 'house' (default, from the Congress.gov API) or 'senate' (from the Senate's official LIS feed). Use 'list' to find votes by congress and session (newest first by default), 'get' for vote details (question, result, tallies, party breakdown, associated bill/nomination/amendment), or 'members' for how each member voted.

Browse presidential nominations to federal positions and track the Senate confirmation process. Use 'list' to browse, 'get' for nomination detail, 'actions'/'committees'/'hearings' for confirmation pipeline data, or 'nominees' to retrieve individual appointees in a multi-nominee batch. Nominations use 'PN' (Presidential Nomination) numbering. Most nominations carry confirmation activity on the parent (e.g., PN1000); multi-part parents (e.g., PN851) carry no activity of their own — their actions, committees, hearings, and nominees live on partitioned children (PN851-1, PN851-2, …). 'get' on a parent that has no nominees array signals the partitioned form is needed for everything below it.