Federal Register Regulations Monitor

Search and monitor US Federal Register documents: rules, proposed rules, and notices by term, agency, or type. For compliance and policy tracking.

What it does

• Full-text search across the Federal Register using the public API (no API key needed).
• Filter by document type: final rule, proposed rule, or notice.
• Filter by a publication date floor to catch only recent activity.
• Export clean, flat records to a dataset plus an aggregate summary in OUTPUT.

Example input

Recent AI-related rules and notices:

{
  "term": "artificial intelligence",
  "types": ["RULE", "NOTICE"],
  "sinceDate": "2026-01-01",
  "maxItems": 40
}

All proposed rules mentioning "tariffs":

{
  "term": "tariffs",
  "types": ["PRORULE"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Input

Field	Type	Description
term	string	Full-text search term matched against title and text. Leave empty to list by type and date only.
types	array	Document types to include: RULE, PRORULE, NOTICE. Defaults to all three.
sinceDate	string	Only include documents published on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
maxItems	integer	How many documents to return (auto-paginated, max 1000). Default 40.

Output

Each dataset item is one document:

{
  "documentNumber": "2025-00636",
  "title": "Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion",
  "type": "Rule",
  "agencies": ["Commerce Department", "Industry and Security Bureau"],
  "publicationDate": "2025-01-15",
  "effectiveDate": "2025-01-13",
  "abstract": "With this interim final rule, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) revises the Export Administration Regulations' controls on advanced computing integrated circuits and adds a new control on artificial intelligence model weights for certain advanced closed-weight dual-use AI models.",
  "htmlUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00636/framework-for-artificial-intelligence-diffusion",
  "pdfUrl": "https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-15/pdf/2025-00636.pdf"
}

Run summary (OUTPUT)

The run's default key-value store record OUTPUT holds an aggregate for the whole result set:

{
  "query": { "term": "artificial intelligence", "types": ["RULE", "NOTICE"], "sinceDate": "2026-01-01" },
  "totalMatched": 304,
  "returned": 40,
  "requestedMaxItems": 40,
  "typeBreakdown": { "Rule": 12, "Notice": 28 },
  "generatedFrom": "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json"
}

How it works

The Actor calls the public Federal Register API with your term, type, and date filters, paginating at 100 documents per page until it has maxItems results or runs out of matches. Every request sends a descriptive User-Agent. Network errors and rate limit or server errors are retried with backoff; other client errors fail fast.

Use cases

• Compliance tracking: watch for new rules and notices in a regulated area.
• Policy research: pull every document mentioning a topic across agencies.
• Competitive intelligence: monitor rulemaking that affects an industry.
• Feed a scheduled run into your own alerting or dashboard.

MIT licensed.