U.S. Government Open Data MCP server

US Government Open Data MCP

MCP Server + TypeScript SDK for 40+ U.S. Government APIs

300+ tools covering economic, fiscal, health, education, energy, environment, lobbying, housing, patents, safety, banking, consumer protection, workplace safety, transportation, seismic, clinical trials, pharma payments, research funding, procurement, and legislative data.

20+ APIs require no key · The rest use free keys that take under a minute to get

Getting Started · API Reference · Documentation

Features

• 300+ tools across 40+ government APIs — economic, health, legislative, financial, environmental, and more
• Cross-referencing — built-in instructions guide the LLM to combine data from multiple agencies (e.g., FDA adverse events + lobbying spend + campaign contributions)
• Code mode — WASM-sandboxed JavaScript execution reduces context window usage by 98-100% for large responses
• Selective loading — load only the modules or domains you need: --modules fred,treasury,congress or --domains economy,health
• Discovery mode — --tool-mode discovery lists 4 tools instead of 350; the model searches for the one it needs
• Sources on every result — meta.sources lists the upstream API requests behind each answer
• Dual transport — stdio for desktop clients, HTTP Stream for web/remote (bearer-token auth off loopback)
• TypeScript SDK — every API is importable as a standalone typed client, no MCP required
• Disk-backed caching — responses cached to disk, survives restarts
• Rate limiting + retry — token-bucket rate limiter with exponential backoff on 429/503

Quick Start

MCP Server

Requires Node.js 22 or later.

npx us-gov-open-data-mcp

Add to .vscode/mcp.json for VS Code / Copilot:

{
  "servers": {
    "us-gov-open-data": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "us-gov-open-data-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FRED_API_KEY": "your_key",
        "DATA_GOV_API_KEY": "your_key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Add to claudedesktopconfig.json for Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "us-gov-open-data": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "us-gov-open-data-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FRED_API_KEY": "your_key",
        "DATA_GOV_API_KEY": "your_key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Example Prompts

Once connected, ask your AI assistant natural language questions:

Economic: "What's the current state of the U.S. economy? Show me GDP, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates."

Health: "Show me the adverse event profile for Ozempic including clinical trials, FDA reports, and pharma payments to doctors."

Legislative: "What happened with the Inflation Reduction Act? Who sponsored it, how did the vote break down by party?"

Follow the money: "Which banking PACs gave money to members of the Senate Banking Committee, and how did those members vote on banking deregulation?"

Cross-reference: "How has federal spending on healthcare changed over the last 5 years, and what health outcomes has it produced?"

TypeScript SDK

npm install us-gov-open-data-mcp

import { getObservations } from "us-gov-open-data-mcp/sdk/fred";
import { searchBills } from "us-gov-open-data-mcp/sdk/congress";

const gdp = await getObservations("GDP", { sort: "desc", limit: 5 });

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.