Congress MCP server

US Congress — Bills, Votes, Members (GovTrack)

US federal bills (House and Senate), members of Congress and roll-call votes, served from GovTrack's public API (www.govtrack.us/api/v2), which mirrors the Library of Congress record from the 93rd Congress (1973) onward. Bill status, who voted what, who sponsors what. Free, no API key.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

For policy research, agents need to know what bills exist, who's sponsoring them, where they are in the legislative process, and how votes broke. Congress.gov is the canonical record. Pair with Federal Register (rules implementing legislation) and USAspending (where the money goes after authorization).

Common flows:

• Bill search. "What bills are pending on AI regulation?" → search by keyword, filter by Congress and chamber.
• Bill detail. "Status of HR 9876?" → get full bill record with sponsor, cosponsors, committee referrals, recent action.
• Member lookup. "Who represents Colorado's 1st district?" → member by state/district or by name.
• Vote tracking. Recorded votes by bill, member, or session.

Auth

None. GovTrack's API is public and keyless; this pack sends no credential.

Search ranking (search_bills)

GovTrack's q parameter is a loose keyword match with no relevance ordering — for "Lower Energy Costs Act" it reports ~4,300 matches and puts a 2014 salmon bill first, while H.R. 1 (118th), the bill literally so named, sits 86th inside its own Congress's matches and beyond the 1,000-row offset GovTrack allows. orderby=relevance is rejected. So searchbills gathers candidates itself and ranks them locally:

• Candidates. One unfiltered page (100 rows) plus one page for each of the three most recent Congresses. If nothing yet contains the query phrase, it pages deeper into those Congresses (up to 300 rows each), then takes one page from each of the six Congresses before them. Pass congress to search a single Congress exhaustively (up to ~1,100 rows) — do this for a bill older than about six years.
• Ranking. Every title a bill has ever carried (display, short, short-partial, official) is scored: exact title, then a title containing the phrase (shorter wins), then all query words present (prefix-tolerant, so "lower" matches "Lowering"), then partial overlap. Ties go to the newer Congress. Each returned bill carries match (exact / phrase / allwords / partial / none) and matchedtitle.
• total is GovTrack's loose-match count, not the number of bills about the subject; total_note says so in the payload, and ranking states that upstream order was not used.

Congress numbering

Congresses are numbered sequentially: 119th Congress = 2025-2027 (started Jan 2025), 118th = 2023-2025, etc. Bills carry their Congress number — HR1 of the 119th is a different bill than HR1 of the 118th.

Bill type prefixes

For "regular legislation" purposes, HR and S are the meaningful types. Resolutions don't have force of law (HRES, SRES) or are limited (HJRES, SJRES — the latter can amend the Constitution if ratified).

Common pitfalls

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.