Govinfo MCP server

@pipeworx/govinfo

GovInfo.gov MCP — full text of US government publications.

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

Tools

• list_collections()
• searchpackages(query, collections?, congress?, datefrom?, dateto?, pagesize?, offset_mark?)
• collections takes one code or several, comma- or space-separated ("CHRG", "CHRG,CRPT"). Several codes search the union — "CHRG,CRPT" returns 9,239 hits for "Cooper", exactly the 5,359 + 3,880 the two collections return on their own.
• page_size also answers to limit.
• getpackage(packageid)
• listgranules(packageid, pagesize?, offsetmark?) — page_size also answers to limit.
• getgranule(packageid, granule_id)

Auth

• Platform key: reuses PLATFORMDATAGOVKEY.
• BYO: ?_apiKey= (api.data.gov key).

Data source

https://api.govinfo.gov — ?api_key= query param.

GAO appropriations law (fleet #1972)

Two tools that make GAO's secondary authority reachable by TOPIC rather than by package id.

gaoredbook(topic?, chapter?, includescopetext?)

Resolves a fiscal-law question to the governing chapter of GAO's Principles of Federal Appropriations Law — the Red Book. Keyless: it reads www.gao.gov, not the GovInfo API, so it works with no data.gov key.

Why it does not use GovInfo. Measured 2026-09-14: the GAOREPORTS collection holds 16,569 packages but zero issued after 2010-01-01, and a full-text search for "Principles of Federal Appropriations Law" returns exactly one relevant package in its top 100 of 1,565 hits — the 2004 Update of the Third Edition. GovInfo cannot serve the current Red Book at all.

Edition handling is the point. GAO now publishes the Red Book chapter by chapter, so the current treatise is a mix:

*"Our current Red Book consists of Chapters 1-3 (of the 4th Edition) and

Chapters 5-15 (of the 3rd Edition)."* — gao.gov, read live on every call

That sentence and the whole table of contents are parsed from GAO's page at call time rather than hardcoded, so Chapter 4 appears the day GAO posts it. Every row names its edition; the 2004 annual update is returned separately under superseded with the reason it is not the answer.

Freshness. sourcelastmodified is the Last-Modified of the chapter PDF itself. The TOC page's Last-Modified is a Drupal render timestamp that reads as today on every call — using it would tell a caller a 2019 chapter was revised this morning.

How matching works, and what it is worth. Chapter titles come off GAO's live page and are authoritative. On top of them sits REDBOOKTOPICALIASES in src/index.ts — a list maintained in this pack, not something GAO publishes, which is why every matched row carries matchbasis saying whether it matched title:, alias: or gaoscope:. The chapters are PDFs and GovInfo does not index them, so an alias cannot be verified against the text; entries are therefore restricted to terms that are the standard NAME of the rule the chapter's own title states (bona fide needs rule → Availability of Appropriations: Time), the US Code section that rule lives at, or a plain-English framing of the question the chapter's title asks. When nothing clears the score floor the tool returns matchconfidence: "none" and the complete table of contents rather than a plausible wrong chapter.

gaocomptrollerdecisions(query, datefrom?, dateto?, includereports?, pagesize?)

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.