The 2022 Congress.gov Top 22 and Year in Review

We are always working to incorporate your feedback into making Congress.gov an even better experience. One major request was one of the biggest items that the Congress.gov team worked on last year: the new Congress.gov API (application programming interface). The API is great if you want to pull a lot of the content of Congress.gov. But some users just want to download their search results. We increased the limit from 1,000 to 5,000 items in your search results that can now be downloaded. With both of these changes, we now have most users who reuse content from the site covered.

Over the last couple of years we have worked to add more historical material to Congress.gov. One example of that is the Bound Congressional Record, which now goes back to the 52nd Congress (1891-1893). Robert shared how to use the Bound Congressional Record to research items such as congressional reactions to the 1918 flu pandemic, the moon landing, and the Kennedy assassination. We also added committee hearing transcripts back to the 103rd Congress (1993-1994). We made the text of bills and resolutions from the 6th-10th Congresses (1799-1809) searchable. The Dates of Past Sessions page now goes back to March 4, 1789 to the first Congress for both the House and Senate.

In February, we added Committee Prints to the Browse page. We also made it easier for you to stay in contact with your members. When you search for your members by your address, you can click “Alerts for These Members” and get email alerts on all three with just one click. We also added a “Contact” link on the Congress.gov Member Profile pages so you can share your feedback with your member. We worked behind the scenes throughout the year to enhance the accessibility of the site. One accessibility enhancement was to add the ability to “Listen to this page” to the Congressional Record. With the last set of enhancements to Congress.gov in 2022, we added a shortened URL from the Share/Save tool from the Advanced Legislation Search Form.

Margaret shared insight from staff who work on Congress.gov in a series of posts and celebrated the legislative process videos. We hosted the third Congress.gov Virtual Public Forum in September where we shared enhancements to the site and continued to receive feedback. We also celebrated ten years of Congress.gov in September.

Top 22 Most-Viewed Bills in 2022

I have now hit a decade of reviewing the most-viewed bills of the year on Congress.gov. Here are the previous most-viewed bill lists from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. For those items that became law, I have added a notation after the title.

1. H.R.1808 – Assault Weapons Ban of 2022
2. H.R.5376 – Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 [Became Law]
3. H.R.8404 – Respect for Marriage Act [Became Law]
4. S.2992 – American Innovation and Choice Online Act
5. H.R.3967 – Honoring our PACT Act of 2022
6. H.R.3617 – Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act
7. H.R.3684 – Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act [Became Law]
8. H.R.1319 – American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 [Became Law]
9. S.623 – Sunshine Protection Act of 2021
10. H.R.2471 – Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 [Became Law]
11. H.R.4521 – United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021
12. H.Res.57 – Impeaching Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States, for abuse of power by enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
13. H.R.7910 – Protecting Our Kids Act
14. S.3522 – Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 [Became Law]
15. H.R.82 – Social Security Fairness Act of 2021
16. H.R.3755 – Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021
17. H.R.3648 – EAGLE Act of 2022
18. H.R.4350 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022
19. H.R.7900 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023
20. H.R.6833 – Continuing Appropriations and Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2023 [Became Law]
21. H.R.7688 – Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act
22. H.R.8 – Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021

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