Congress.gov Bill Tracker - Sponsors, Subjects & Legislative Actions

Scrape US Congress bill data from the official Congress.gov API. Returns bill details, sponsor and cosponsor records with party and state breakdown, committee assignments, policy subject tags, and latest legislative actions across all bill types and congresses. Runs against the real API — no HTML scraping, no proxy, no fragile selectors.

What data does it extract?

Each record represents one bill:

Field	Description
billId	Unique bill identifier (e.g. 119-hr-1)
congress	Congress number (e.g. 119)
billType	HR, S, HJRES, SJRES, HCONRES, SCONRES, HRES, SRES
billNumber	Bill number within the type
title	Official bill title
introducedDate	Date introduced (YYYY-MM-DD)
originChamber	House or Senate
policyArea	Primary policy area from the Library of Congress system
sponsorBioguide	Sponsor's congressional bioguide ID
sponsorName	Sponsor's full name and district
sponsorParty	Sponsor's party (R, D, I)
sponsorState	Sponsor's state abbreviation
cosponsorCount	Number of cosponsors
cosponsors	Array of cosponsor strings: Name (Party-State, Date)
committees	Array of committee names the bill was referred to
subjects	Array of Library of Congress policy subject tags
latestActionDate	Date of most recent action (YYYY-MM-DD)
latestActionText	Text of most recent action
amendmentCount	Number of amendments filed
relatedBillCount	Number of related bills
textUrl	URL to the HTML bill text on congress.gov
legislationUrl	Bill's congress.gov page
apiUrl	Congress.gov API URL for the bill detail
updateDate	ISO datetime when the record was last updated

Sample output record

{
  "congress": 119,
  "billType": "HR",
  "billNumber": "1",
  "billId": "119-hr-1",
  "title": "Lower Energy Costs Act",
  "introducedDate": "2025-01-03",
  "originChamber": "House",
  "policyArea": "Energy",
  "sponsorName": "Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1]",
  "sponsorParty": "R",
  "sponsorState": "LA",
  "cosponsorCount": 12,
  "cosponsors": [
    "Rep. McMorris Rodgers, Cathy (R-WA, 2025-01-10)"
  ],
  "committees": ["Energy and Commerce Committee"],
  "subjects": ["Energy policy", "Oil and gas"],
  "latestActionDate": "2025-03-30",
  "latestActionText": "Passed/agreed to in House.",
  "textUrl": "https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr1/BILLS-119hr1eh.htm",
  "legislationUrl": "https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1",
  "updateDate": "2025-04-01T14:22:00Z"
}

How to use it

Field	Type	Default	Description
apiKey	string	—	Your free API key from api.congress.gov/sign-up/. Without one, the DEMO_KEY is used (30 req/hr, testing only).
congress	integer	119	Congress number (119 = current, 118 = previous). Leave blank for all.
billType	string	All	hr, s, hjres, sjres, hconres, sconres, hres, sres
updatedSince	string	—	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD). Fetch only bills updated after this date.
fetchCosponsors	boolean	true	Fetch full cosponsor list. One extra API call per bill.
fetchSubjects	boolean	true	Fetch policy subject tags. One extra API call per bill.
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum bills to return. 0 = unlimited.

Example: full crawl of current Congress Senate bills

{
  "congress": 119,
  "billType": "s",
  "fetchCosponsors": true,
  "fetchSubjects": true,
  "maxItems": 0
}

Incremental monitoring with scheduled runs

The updatedSince field is the key input for legislative monitoring. Set it to yesterday's date and pair with an Apify scheduled run to pull only bills that have been introduced or acted on since your last run:

{
  "congress": 119,
  "updatedSince": "2026-06-24",
  "fetchCosponsors": true,
  "fetchSubjects": true,
  "maxItems": 500
}

This avoids re-fetching the full corpus on every run. Bills are returned sorted by most-recently-updated, so fresh activity surfaces first.

Use cases

• Lobbying and government affairs — track bills in specific policy areas, monitor cosponsor movement, flag bills that reach committee
• ESG and compliance analytics — monitor proposed regulations by subject area and sponsor party affiliation
• Legislative NLP — build a training corpus of bill titles, subject tags, and action history for legislative text classification
• Policy research — construct longitudinal datasets of legislative activity across congresses for academic study
• Journalism — follow a bill from introduction to floor vote in structured JSON without manual data entry

FAQ

Is the Congress.gov API free? Yes. A production API key allows 5,000 req/hr and is issued instantly at api.congress.gov/sign-up/. The DEMO_KEY shared key is limited to 30 req/hr and suitable for testing only.

What bill types are available? HR (House bills), S (Senate bills), HJRES/SJRES (joint resolutions), HCONRES/SCONRES (concurrent resolutions), HRES/SRES (simple resolutions).

How do I get data for a specific policy area? Run with fetchSubjects: true and filter the resulting dataset on the subjects array or policyArea field. The actor returns everything; downstream filtering on subject tags is the standard workflow.

Output is available in JSON, CSV, and Excel via the Apify dataset export panel.