Congress.gov API
Agent-ready OpenAPI document · curated by JenticData EnrichmentData TransformationapiKey60 EndpointsREST
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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.
Use for: Find the most recent action on H.R. 1 in the 118th Congress, List all bills cosponsored by Senator Smith this session, Get the full text of the latest version of S. 250, Search for bills with the subject Climate Change
Not supported: Does not handle state legislatures, executive-branch regulations, or full document hosting (PDF storage) - use for U.S. federal legislative metadata only.
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.
Install Jentic One Beta
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.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fcongress.gov%2Fcongress-gov" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fcongress.gov%2Fcongress-gov" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic 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.
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
Look up a member of Congress and read their committee assignments and sponsored bills
List nominations awaiting Senate confirmation and read their actions
Pull committee reports, congressional record entries, and treaty documents
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Congress.gov 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 your Jentic One instance. 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
GET
/amendment/{congress}/{amendmentType}/{amendmentNumber}
Get a specific amendment
Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
Setup
Wiring the Congress.gov API by hand means registering for an api_key, appending it as a query parameter on every request, and building the paging over bills, amendments, and their sub-collections yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import the Congress.gov API from the API Directory, store the api_key once, and your agent calls it.
Permission scoping
The Congress.gov API is read-only over U.S. federal legislative metadata, so you limit the agent to the GET operations it needs, such as fetching a bill or its actions and cosponsors, and it can retrieve nothing beyond that set. Because every operation only reads public legislative data, there is nothing for the agent to modify or delete.
Credential isolation
Your Congress.gov api_key is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'get the text of a bill' or 'list a bill's cosponsors', and Jentic returns the matching Congress.gov operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using Congress.gov 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 with Jentic One, the self-hosted execution layer.
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.
Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Congress.gov API?
Yes. Jentic One is self-hosted, so your own rules decide which operations and credentials your agent may use, and you can restrict it to only the GET operations it needs, such as fetching a bill or its actions and cosponsors. The Congress.gov API is read-only over U.S. federal legislative metadata, so there is nothing for the agent to modify or delete, and it can retrieve nothing beyond the endpoints you allow. Your api_key is injected server-side at execution time by your own instance, so the agent never sees the raw credential.
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