US Congress Members Scraper

Scrape Congress.gov — the US Congress's own official data service — for current members of the Senate and House, and for recent legislation. Get each member's name, party, state, chamber, district, Bioguide ID, official portrait, and congress.gov profile link, filtered by office, state, and party. Switch to bill mode for recent legislation in any Congress with its number, origin chamber, and latest action. HTTP-only via the public api.congress.gov v3 API. No auth, no proxy.

What this actor does

• Two modes: officials (current officeholders) and recentBills (legislation for a given Congress)
• Filters: office (Senator / Representative / Governor), 2-letter state code, and party
• Any Congress: target a specific session by number — 119 is the 2025–2027 Congress
• Official portraits: members carry the Congress.gov image URL where one is published
• Empty fields are omitted

Output: per official (mode = officials)

• name, memberName — member's full name
• bioguideId — Biographical Directory ID, the stable cross-system key for US legislators
• office — Senator, Representative, or Governor
• chamber — Senate, House of Representatives, or Executive
• state — state name or 2-letter code depending on office
• stateCode — 2-letter code (governors)
• district — congressional district number (Representatives)
• party — party affiliation
• imageUrl — official portrait
• profileUrl — member page on congress.gov
• updatedAt — when Congress.gov last revised the record
• recordType — official or governor
• scrapedAt

Output: per bill (mode = recentBills)

• billTitle — full title of the legislation
• billNumber — e.g. HR1234, S567
• congress — Congress number the bill belongs to
• originChamber — House or Senate
• latestAction — text of the most recent action taken
• latestActionDate — when that action occurred
• billUrl — Congress.gov API record for the bill
• recordType: "bill", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	officials	officials / recentBills
office	string	Senator	Senator / Representative / Governor (mode=officials)
state	string	CA	2-letter state code; blank for all states
party	string	–	Democratic / Republican / Independent; blank for all
congress	int	119	Congress number (93–130)
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap (1–500)

Example: all current senators

{
  "mode": "officials",
  "office": "Senator",
  "state": "",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example: one state's House delegation

{
  "mode": "officials",
  "office": "Representative",
  "state": "TX",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: senators from one party

{
  "mode": "officials",
  "office": "Senator",
  "party": "Democratic",
  "maxItems": 60
}

Example: recent legislation

{
  "mode": "recentBills",
  "congress": 119,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Use cases

• Civic tech — build a "who represents me" lookup keyed on state and district
• Advocacy and public affairs — maintain a current contact roster for the Senate and House
• Journalism — track party composition by state and monitor recent legislative activity
• Academic research — export member rosters with Bioguide IDs to join against voting datasets
• CRM enrichment — keep legislator records current with official portraits and profile links
• Legislative monitoring — watch latest actions on bills in the current Congress

FAQ

Where does this data come from? The official Congress.gov API run by the Library of Congress — the authoritative source for US legislative data. See api.congress.gov.

Is this affiliated with Congress.gov or the Library of Congress? No. This is a third-party actor using their public API.

Do I need an API key? No. The actor uses the shared public demo key, which carries a modest rate limit. Large runs are paced and retried, but very heavy use may be throttled upstream.

What is a Bioguide ID? The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress identifier, e.g. P000197. It is stable across sessions and is the standard key for joining against voting records, campaign finance, and third-party legislative datasets.

Where do Governor records come from? Not from Congress.gov — governors are state executives and are not in the congressional API. They are served from a reference list embedded in the actor, current as of 2026. Treat them as a static convenience list, not live-scraped data, and verify against the state's own site before relying on them.

Can I get the President, or state Attorneys General? No. Those options were removed because Congress.gov does not carry them — previously they returned either nothing or governor records under a misleading label.

Does recentBills include roll-call votes? No. It returns bills with their latest recorded action, which is a legislative-activity feed rather than per-member vote tallies. Individual roll-call votes are not exposed by this actor.

What does the congress number mean? Each two-year session gets a number — 119 covers 2025–2027, 118 covers 2023–2025, and so on. It selects which session recentBills draws from and scopes state-filtered member lookups.

Why do some members have no district? Only Representatives have districts. Senators serve an entire state, so the field is dropped for them.

How fresh is the data? Live at run time. Congress.gov updates membership after seats change and publishes bill actions within a day or so.