An Update on the Congress.gov API

The following is a guest post by Andrew Reiter, a legislative data specialist within the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress.

Last September, Congress.gov introduced the beta Congress.gov API. Today, we are thrilled to announce that the beta label has been removed from the Congress.gov API. We are very excited about this news and a great deal of hard work has gone on behind the scenes this year to make this happen. As we celebrate the removal of the beta label, we are greatly appreciative of our data partners, the Congressional Data Task Force, and our users.

Since announcing the beta API, the Congress.gov API has added several new endpoints and enhancements that include new endpoints for the daily Congressional Record and the bound Congressional Record. While we have created several new endpoints, existing endpoints continue to be enhanced. For example, the Library of Congress is investigating how to provide all committee video metadata elements from a single data source, the Congress.gov API Committee Meeting endpoint. We expect there will be more collaboration with our data partners, developers, and users on how to create new, useful, and exciting features within the Congress.gov API.

There is a GitHub page for the Congress.gov API where you can get additional information and provide feedback if you encounter any issues, bugs, or difficulties. Our developers and our team greatly appreciate feedback and use this to consider possible changes, fixes, and enhancements to the API. We also encourage users to look at the issues section for information which can help answer possible queries. Additionally, the GitHub repository hosts a Change Log that details past changes to the API and upcoming API development.

The collaboration and feedback with our partners and users have greatly improved the API’s collections and usability. We look forward to adding more of Congress.gov’s fantastic collections to the API and making Congress.gov collections more accessible to our users.

Enhancements 

With today’s release the Congress.gov enhancements include:

Enhancement – Legislation – Download Amendments First Iteration

• You can use the Download Results link on the amendments tab of a bill to save a spreadsheet of metadata and text where available. See Coverage Dates for availability of amendment text.
• You may need to wrap text and resize the Amendment Text column in order to view the text in the downloaded Excel file.
• Extremely large texts will be incomplete.

Congress.gov API

• The Congress.gov API is no longer in beta as endpoints for all Congress.gov collections have been added.
• Improvements based on user feedback have been implemented.
• You can sign up for a key to use the Congress.gov API  to retrieve legislative data in a machine-readable format.

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