Congress Issue Activity Tracker: Sponsors, Bills & Enacted Laws

Congress Issue Activity Tracker — Sponsors, Bills & Enacted Laws

This Actor answers a narrow question with official records: which bills has this member of Congress sponsored or cosponsored on this issue, and how far did they get? Give it issues (e.g. insulin, border security, veterans) and, optionally, legislators. It returns each member's bills sponsored and cosponsored on that issue, how far they got (committee, passed a chamber, became law), and links to every bill, built from the GovInfo BILLSTATUS bulk data published by the Library of Congress and GPO.

Built for journalists and fact-checkers, voters and civic groups, advocacy and policy organizations, lobbyists and government-affairs teams, campaign researchers, educators.

• Per member, per issue: bills sponsored, cosponsored, sponsored bills that advanced, sponsored and cosponsored bills enacted, furthest stage reached, last activity, an activity score, and the evidence bills.
• No legislators given? You get the most active members on each issue, ranked.
• Not found is an answer: requested members with no matching bills get an explicit "no matching activity" row (charged like any record).
• Match issues against bill titles, official CRS subjects, policy area and CRS summaries.
• Add-on (off by default): one spreadsheet-ready row per evidence bill.
• Neutral and nonpartisan: counts and links only, no ratings of anyone's sincerity.

No login, no API key, no proxies: official bulk files, fetched politely and cached for 24 hours.

Use it as a Congress.gov bill tracker by issue, a bill sponsorship and cosponsorship lookup, a legislative record research tool or a GovInfo BILLSTATUS API alternative with no key: search any policy issue (healthcare, immigration, energy, veterans, AI, guns, taxes), see who in the House and Senate is most active on it, and export the results to CSV, Excel, JSON or Google Sheets.

Why this one

	This Actor	Typical Congress scraper
Question answered	"What did X do on issue Y?"	Raw bill lists
Outcome	Furthest stage + enacted counts	Latest action text only
Issue matching	Titles + CRS subjects + policy area + summaries	Title keywords
Source	Official GovInfo bulk data, no API key	Scraped congress.gov pages or keyed APIs
Missing members	Explicit no-activity row	Silently empty

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When
Issue record	$0.005	One member × one issue, with evidence bills
Bill evidence row add-on	+$0.001 per bill row	Only if includeBillRows is on
Actor start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event

How that compares: Congress/bill scrapers on the Store cost about $1–$5 per 1,000 raw bills, and you still have to match members, issues and outcomes yourself. An issue record is already that aggregation, so checking 10 members on 5 issues costs $0.25.

An issue record is not a raw bill. It is one member × one issue aggregate: counts, furthest stage and up to maxBillsPerRow linked evidence bills. Turn on includeBillRows if you want one row per underlying bill.

Billing examples: each run is billed for what it returns (no incremental mode): 1 issue × 1 member = 1 issue record = $0.005; the same with 4 evidence bill rows = $0.009; 10 members × 5 issues with no bill rows = $0.25. Set Max charge per run to cap spend.

Input examples

What did these senators do on border security and insulin?

{ "issues": ["border security", "insulin"], "legislators": ["Cruz", "S001184"], "includeBillRows": true }

Most active members on veterans' issues last Congress:

{ "issues": ["veterans"], "congresses": ["118"], "topLegislatorsPerIssue": 25 }

Output (issue record)

issue, bioguideId, legislator, party, state, district, billsSponsored, billsCosponsored, sponsoredBillsAdvanced, sponsoredBillsEnacted, cosponsoredBillsEnacted, furthestStage, activityScore, lastActivity, bills[] (billId, role, title, stage, introduced, latestAction, url), totalMatchingBills, note. Bill rows add policyArea, subjects, sponsor, cosponsorCount.

How to read it

• Activity score weights (published so you can recompute or ignore it):

  Component	Weight
  Sponsored bill	3
  Cosponsorship	1
  Sponsored bill that passed at least one chamber	+4
  Sponsored bill enacted	+6
  Cosponsored bill enacted	+2

  It measures sponsorship activity only: not effectiveness, sincerity or votes. Bill counts reward volume; companion House/Senate bills and reintroductions are each counted, so one policy idea can appear more than once.

• Match type: each evidence bill has matchType: title (official title matched), subject (CRS subject or policy area matched) or summary-or-alt-title (only the CRS summary or a short/alternate title matched; weakest evidence, check it).

• Limitations: Sponsor and cosponsor roles are both counted; cosponsorship is much cheaper than sponsorship.

• Stages are derived from official action text: introduced → reported by committee → passed one chamber → passed both → sent to President → became law (or vetoed).

• Much of what members do (votes, amendments, oversight, appropriations, speeches, constituent work) isn't sponsorship. Votes may come in a later version.

• A one-word legislator name matches last name exactly; use the Bioguide ID to be precise.

FAQ

How do I see what bills a member of Congress sponsored on an issue? Put the issue phrases in issues (e.g. "insulin", "border security") and the members in legislators (Bioguide ID like S001184, last name, or first + last name). You get one row per member per issue with sponsored and cosponsored counts, furthest stage reached, enacted counts and links to every bill.

Can I find the most active legislators on an issue? Yes. Leave legislators empty and set topLegislatorsPerIssue (default 10). Members are ranked by the published activity score.

Does it cover the House and the Senate? Yes, both chambers: House and Senate bills and joint resolutions by default, plus simple and concurrent resolutions if you add them in billTypes. Congresses 113 (2013) to the current one.

Does it include roll-call votes? Not yet. It covers bill sponsorship, cosponsorship and outcomes. For House roll-call votes, see the House Voting Record Actor linked below.

Do I need a Congress.gov API key? No. It reads the official GovInfo BILLSTATUS bulk data (the data behind congress.gov), which needs no key.

How much does it cost? $0.005 per member × issue record ($5 per 1,000); 10 members on 5 issues cost $0.25. Optional per-bill rows add $0.001 each.

Is it partisan? No. It reports counts, stages and links from the official record for every member the same way, and doesn't rate anyone.

Data source and legal notes

• GovInfo BILLSTATUS bulk data (U.S. Government Publishing Office / Library of Congress), the same data behind congress.gov. Public domain; downloaded from the documented bulk-data repository, which robots.txt allows.
• Not affiliated with or endorsed by Congress, GPO or the Library of Congress.

Disclaimer

This tool summarizes the public legislative record as is. It does not rate, score the sincerity of, or judge any legislator, and isn't legal or political advice. Bill data can lag by a day or more, and keyword matching can include or miss bills. Check the linked official bill pages before you publish. Don't use it to harass anyone.

Support

Found a problem or want roll-call votes added? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab. More Clearfeed Labs data feeds: clearfeedlabs.com.

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