Congress.gov API

Name: Congress.gov API API
Brand: Congress.gov API
Availability: InStock

★ Only Publicly Available OpenAPI DocumentData EnrichmentData TransformationapiKey60 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Look up U.S. bills, amendments, members of Congress, committees, nominations, and treaties. Useful for agents that monitor legislation, brief policy teams, or build civic-tech tools.

Connect the Congress.gov API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Congress.gov API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Install Jentic One Beta (Self-Hosted)

Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Congress.gov API API.

Look up a specific bill by congress, bill type, and bill number to read its current status

Pull all actions on a bill to track its passage through committee, floor, and conference

List cosponsors of a bill to identify member alignment on a topic

Fetch official summaries and full text versions of a bill for briefing or analysis

GET STARTED

Start building with Congress.gov API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI document for Congress.gov API, keeping it validated and agent-ready.

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI specification for Congress.gov API, keeping it validated and agent-ready. The Congress.gov API is the official U.S. Library of Congress feed of federal legislative data, covering bills, amendments, members, committees, nominations, treaties, congressional records, and committee reports. The 60 endpoints expose lookups by congress number, bill type and number, member ID, committee, and amendment, with sub-resources for actions, cosponsors, summaries, subjects, titles, and full text versions. It is the canonical source for tracking U.S. federal legislation.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Congress.gov API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Legislative Tracking Dashboard

Build a dashboard that tracks specific bills through the legislative process. The agent calls GET /bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/actions on a schedule, stores new actions in a database, and notifies subscribers when a tracked bill advances. Sub-resources for cosponsors, committees, and text versions are pulled on demand to surface the latest status. This replaces ad-hoc scraping with a reliable structured feed.

Call GET /bill/118/hr/1/actions every 15 minutes, diff against the last cached response, and post new action_date and text entries to the legislation Slack channel.

Member Voting Profile Reports

Generate a profile for a specific member of Congress that includes sponsored bills, cosponsored bills, and committee assignments. The agent calls GET /member/{bioguideId} and supporting endpoints, then composes a Markdown brief. This is useful for press secretaries, advocacy groups, and policy researchers who want a current snapshot without a manual trawl through congress.gov.

Fetch member B001230 via GET /member/{bioguideId} and combine with their sponsored and cosponsored bills to produce a one-page Markdown profile for the policy team.

AI Policy Research Assistant

Power a research assistant that can answer factual questions about U.S. legislation. When a user asks what is in H.R. 1 of the 118th Congress, the agent calls GET /bill/118/hr/1/summaries for the official summary and GET /bill/118/hr/1/text for the latest text version, then produces a grounded response. Because the data comes from the official Library of Congress feed, hallucination risk drops sharply.

On the question what is in H.R. 1?, call GET /bill/118/hr/1/summaries and GET /bill/118/hr/1/text, then return a citation-backed summary referencing both endpoints.

AI Agent Civic-Tech Integration via Jentic

Expose Congress.gov data inside an agent without managing the API key in prompts. The agent searches Jentic for find a us bill, loads the GET /bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber} schema, and executes it with the api_key parameter populated server-side from the Jentic vault. The same wrapper covers members, amendments, and committee reports for civic-tech assistants.

Through Jentic, search find a us bill, load the GET /bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber} schema, and execute it for congress 118, billType hr, billNumber 1.

Key Endpoints

60 endpoints — jentic publishes the only available openapi specification for congress.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}

Get a specific bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/actions

Get actions on a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/text

Get text versions of a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/cosponsors

Get cosponsors of a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/summaries

Get official summaries of a bill

GET

/amendment/{congress}/{amendmentType}/{amendmentNumber}

Get a specific amendment

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}

Get a specific bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/actions

Get actions on a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/text

Get text versions of a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/cosponsors

Get cosponsors of a bill

GET

/bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/summaries

Get official summaries of a bill

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

The Congress.gov api_key is stored encrypted in the Jentic vault and added to outgoing requests as a query parameter. Agents receive scoped Jentic tokens; the raw key never enters the agent's context.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic by intent (for example, get actions on a us bill) and Jentic returns the matching Congress.gov operation with its input schema, so the agent picks the right endpoint without scanning the docs.

Time to first call

Direct Congress.gov integration: 2-4 hours for key handling, pagination, and the congress/billType/billNumber path conventions. Through Jentic: under 1 hour — search, load schema, execute.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Complementary

GovInfo API

GovInfo provides full-text access to congressional and federal government documents

Use GovInfo alongside Congress.gov when you need the full document content (PDF/XML) of bills, hearings, and the Federal Register, not just metadata.

Complementary

data.gov API

data.gov is the umbrella catalog for U.S. federal open datasets

Use data.gov when the question expands beyond legislation to other federal data; use Congress.gov for bill-, member-, and committee-level facts.

Alternative

GovInfo Federal Register

GovInfo also covers regulatory and executive-branch publications outside the legislative branch

Pick GovInfo when the user needs executive orders or regulatory text; pick Congress.gov for legislation, members, and treaties.

FAQs

Specific to using Congress.gov API API through Jentic.

Why is there no official OpenAPI spec for Congress.gov API?

The Library of Congress publishes Swagger-style docs but not a maintained OpenAPI 3 specification suitable for agent tooling. Jentic generates and maintains this spec so that AI agents and developers can call Congress.gov API via structured tooling. It is validated against the live API and kept up to date. Get started at https://app.jentic.com/sign-up.

What authentication does the Congress.gov API use?

It uses an API key passed as the api_key query parameter on every request. Keys are issued for free at api.congress.gov via api.data.gov. Through Jentic the key is held in the vault and inserted server-side, so the raw key never enters the agent's prompt.

Can I get the full text of a bill through this API?

Yes. GET /bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/text returns links to all available text versions of a bill (introduced, engrossed, enrolled) along with format options. You then fetch the format you need (XML, PDF, or HTML) from the returned URL.

What are the rate limits for the Congress.gov API?

The API is gated behind api.data.gov, which applies a rolling-hour limit per API key (commonly 5,000 requests per hour). When the limit is reached the response is HTTP 429, so an agent should back off and retry on the next hour boundary.

Can I look up a specific member of Congress?

Yes. GET /member/{bioguideId} returns a member's profile including chamber, party, state, and current term. Combine with the sponsored and cosponsored bill endpoints under /member to build a complete legislative profile.

How do I track a bill through Jentic?

Run pip install jentic, then await client.search('get actions on a us bill'), load the matching operation schema, and execute it. The underlying call is GET /bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}/actions with the bill identifiers you supply at runtime.