FEC Campaign-Finance Delta, Concentration & Donor Graph

Turn the FEC's raw itemized data into the three views political-intel teams actually use: a new-filing / new-receipt delta feed, donor & vendor concentration analytics (Herfindahl / HHI), and a contributor ↔ committee graph. Sourced live from the official OpenFEC API (api.open.fec.gov).

Bring your own free api.data.gov key. Register in seconds at https://api.open.fec.gov/developers and paste it into apiKey. DEMO_KEY works only for light testing (~30 requests/hour, shared IP).

Who it's for

• Political-intelligence & opposition research — monitor a committee or candidate for new money as it's filed.
• Journalists & watchdogs — surface the biggest donors, employers, and vendors behind a committee, and how concentrated its funding is.
• PAC / campaign compliance & finance teams — track receipts and disbursements, reconcile filings, and watch counterparties.
• Data & AI agents — a clean, chainable tool over FEC data (see MCP note).

What it does

• search — list matching receipts (schedule_a), disbursements (schedule_b), or filings (/filings).
• delta — only NEW rows since a date and/or not seen in a prior run (a rolling seen-set is kept for scheduled monitoring).
• concentration — top donors/vendors by summed amount plus a Herfindahl (HHI) score (0–10000) measuring how concentrated the funding is.
• graph — a contributor ↔ committee (or vendor ↔ committee) edge list.

Example input

{
  "apiKey": "YOUR_API_DATA_GOV_KEY",
  "mode": "concentration",
  "dataType": "receipts",
  "committeeId": "C00401224",
  "sinceDate": "2025-01-01",
  "concentrationBy": "employer",
  "topN": 50,
  "maxResults": 2000
}

New-filings monitor:

{ "apiKey": "YOUR_KEY", "mode": "delta", "dataType": "filings", "committeeId": "C00401224", "sinceDate": "2025-09-01" }

Output fields

Every row uses one stable, snake_case schema (nulls where a field doesn't apply):

field	meaning
record_type	receipt / disbursement / filing / concentration / concentration_summary / edge
committee_id, committee_name	the FEC committee
candidate_id, candidate_name	linked candidate, if any
contributor_name, contributor_employer, contributor_occupation	donor details (receipts)
amount	transaction amount (USD)
date	transaction/filing date, YYYY-MM-DD
recipient_or_payee	receiving committee (receipts) or vendor/payee (disbursements)
state	contributor / recipient / committee state
memo	purpose / receipt type / document type
source_url	link to the FEC source image/PDF
retrieved_at	ISO fetch timestamp
entity, counterparty	concentration/graph rollup + its committee
total_amount, txn_count	summed amount + transaction count for the entity/edge
concentration_score	Herfindahl points — total HHI on a summary row; share%² on an entity/edge row

Use as an MCP tool

This actor is callable by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) via mcp.apify.com. Field-level output descriptions make it a clean, chainable tool: an agent can pull a committee's receipts, then feed the donor/employer concentration or the contributor→committee edge list into the next step.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? Yes — a free api.data.gov key. Get one at https://api.open.fec.gov/developers . DEMO_KEY is rate-limited to ~30/hr.

How do I find a committee or candidate ID? Search on fec.gov — committee ids look like C00401224, candidate ids like P80001571.

How does the delta / new-filings feed work? Pass mode=delta with a sinceDate and/or the prior run's ids in priorItems; the actor also keeps a rolling seen-set so scheduled runs emit only new activity.

What is the concentration score? A Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) over the selected entities' shares of total dollars, on the standard 0–10000 scale — high values mean a committee's money comes from a few donors/employers/vendors.

Which data can I pull? Itemized contributions (schedule_a), disbursements (schedule_b), and report filings (/filings), scoped by committee, candidate, name, state, date range, and minimum amount.

Notes

• Data is sourced from the official OpenFEC API; amounts and names are as filed with the FEC.
• Billing is a single automatic Result event per dataset item.