Congress.gov API

Name: Congress.gov 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.

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.

Step 1: 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

Step 2: 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.

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

GET STARTED

Start building with Congress.gov API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

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

Why Jentic?

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

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.

Time to first call

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.