FEC Campaign Finance Scraper

FEC campaign finance data and campaign donations scraper — pull political donor data from the official OpenFEC API, sorted biggest-donors-first, with donor, employer, and occupation filtering.

Built for journalists, opposition researchers, compliance teams, and political data teams who need structured individual-contribution records without hand-querying fec.gov page by page. The actor reads the official OpenFEC API (37M+ individual-contribution records) and returns results sorted by amount descending, so the largest donors surface first.

Bring your own free key. OpenFEC works with the built-in DEMO_KEY, but it's heavily rate-limited and redacts some date fields. Grab a free key at api.data.gov (takes a minute) and pass it as apiKey for full speed and complete records.

What you get

Field	Description
contributorName	Name of the individual contributor
amount	Contribution amount in USD (number)
date	Date the contribution was received
contributorState	Contributor's state
contributorCity	Contributor's city
contributorZip	Contributor's ZIP code
employer	Contributor's reported employer
occupation	Contributor's reported occupation
committeeName	Receiving committee name
committeeId	FEC committee ID
candidateName	Associated candidate name
candidateOffice	Office sought (H/S/P)
receiptType	FEC receipt type code
transactionId	Unique transaction ID
url	Link to the record on fec.gov

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
apiKey	string	—	Your free api.data.gov key (recommended; DEMO_KEY used if blank)
cycle	integer	2024	Two-year election cycle to query
contributorState	string	—	Filter by contributor state, e.g. CA
committeeId	string	—	Filter by FEC committee ID
contributorName	string	—	Filter by contributor name
contributorEmployer	string	—	Filter by reported employer
minAmount	number	—	Only return contributions at or above this amount
maxItems	integer	1000	Maximum number of records to return

Example input

{
  "apiKey": "YOUR_FREE_KEY",
  "cycle": 2024,
  "contributorState": "CA",
  "contributorEmployer": "Google",
  "minAmount": 1000,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example run output

{
  "contributorName": "SMITH, JANE",
  "amount": 3300,
  "date": "2024-03-18",
  "contributorState": "CA",
  "contributorCity": "Mountain View",
  "contributorZip": "94043",
  "employer": "Google",
  "occupation": "Software Engineer",
  "committeeName": "EXAMPLE FOR CONGRESS",
  "committeeId": "C00123456",
  "candidateName": "DOE, JOHN",
  "candidateOffice": "H",
  "receiptType": "15",
  "transactionId": "SA11AI.123456",
  "url": "https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?transaction_id=SA11AI.123456"
}

Use cases

• Journalists tracing who funds a candidate, sorted biggest-donors-first for fast lede-finding.
• Opposition researchers filtering political donor data by employer, occupation, and state.
• Compliance teams auditing contributions tied to a specific committee or cycle.
• Political data teams ingesting structured FEC campaign finance data into models instead of scraping fec.gov by hand.

Pricing

Pay per result — billed only for the contribution records returned, no subscription.

Keywords

FEC campaign finance data, campaign donations scraper, political donor data, OpenFEC API scraper, individual contributions data, political contributions scraper, donor employer occupation data, fec.gov scraper