🏛️ GovInfo Publications Scraper

🚀 Pull official US government publications in seconds. Bills, Federal Register, Congressional Record, committee reports, and the US Code, straight from the public govinfo.gov collections API.

🕒 Last updated 2026-06-05 · 📊 11 fields per record · 15+ federal collections · Bills, hearings, reports, regulations · Updated daily by GPO

The GovInfo Publications Scraper turns the official Government Publishing Office (GPO) api.govinfo.gov/collections endpoint into a structured dataset of federal publications. Pick a collection (Bills, Federal Register, Congressional Record, US Code, etc.), set a date range, and the actor walks the paginated response and flattens each package into one row.

GovInfo is the authoritative source for official US federal documents, maintained by the GPO and trusted by lawyers, journalists, and researchers.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
⚖️ Legal researchers	Track new bills and statutes by Congress
📰 Investigative journalists	Monitor the Federal Register for new rules
🏢 Policy analysts	Build longitudinal datasets of congressional activity
🤖 ML engineers	Train models on official legislative text
🏛️ Civic tech builders	Power public dashboards of congressional output

📋 What the GovInfo Publications Scraper does

• Calls api.govinfo.gov/collections/{collection}/{startDate}/{endDate} with your filters.
• Walks the paginated response across pageSize and offset.
• Flattens each package into one row with stable columns.
• Builds the canonical PDF URL for every package so you can pipe to a downloader.
• Pushes any upstream error as a single record rather than crashing the run.

💡 Why it matters GovInfo holds the authoritative copy of every US federal publication, but its API requires you to chunk by date range and walk offsets. This actor handles pagination so you can focus on the data.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
collection	enum	No	GovInfo collection. Default BILLS.
startDate	string	No	ISO 8601 lower bound. Default 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z.
endDate	string	No	ISO 8601 upper bound. Empty means now.
congress	integer	No	Optional Congress number (e.g. 118).
docClass	string	No	Optional document class slug (e.g. hr, s).
maxItems	integer	No	Free plan caps at 10. Paid up to 1,000,000.

Example 1, recent House bills:

{
  "collection": "BILLS",
  "startDate": "2025-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "docClass": "hr",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example 2, latest Federal Register entries:

{
  "collection": "FR",
  "startDate": "2026-05-01T00:00:00Z",
  "maxItems": 100
}

⚠️ Good to Know The operator running this actor needs a free data.gov API key set as the GOVINFO_API_KEY environment variable. Get one in 30 seconds at api.data.gov/signup.

📊 Output

Each record is a flat object. error is always last.

Field	Type	Description
🆔 packageId	string	Unique GovInfo package identifier.
📄 title	string	Publication title.
📚 collection	string	Collection code (BILLS, FR, CREC, etc.).
🏛️ congress	integer	Congress number when applicable.
🗂️ docClass	string	Document class (hr, s, hres, sres, etc.).
📅 publishDate	string	Date issued.
🕒 lastModified	string	Last modified timestamp from GPO.
📎 pdfUrl	string	Direct link to the official PDF on govinfo.gov.
🔢 granuleCount	integer	Number of sub-documents inside the package.
🏢 branch	string	Government branch when present.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	When this row was fetched.
❌ error	string	Set if the upstream response was an error.

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🆓 | Free official GPO data, no scraping needed. | | 📚 | 15+ federal collections covered out of the box. | | 📎 | Auto-builds the direct PDF URL for every package. | | 🛟 | Pagination handled, error responses surfaced cleanly. | | 🔌 | Plain HTTP, no browsers, fast and resilient. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup	Pagination	PDF URL builder
Roll your own fetch	30 min plus	manual	manual
Python govinfo client	install plus script	partial	partial
This Actor	5 sec, no install	✅	✅

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Pick a collection and a startDate.
3. Click Start.
4. Open the dataset when the run finishes.

💼 Business use cases

⚖️ Legal monitoring Watch the Federal Register for new agency rules affecting your industry.

📊 Policy research Pull all bills introduced in a Congress and feed pandas for descriptive stats.

📰 Newsroom backbone Reporters can verify the exact text of a public law in seconds.

🤖 ML training Build a corpus of official legislative text for legal LLMs.

🔌 Automating GovInfo Publications Scraper

• Make and Zapier trigger on schedule and push results to Airtable, Google Sheets, or Slack.
• Cron native Apify scheduler runs the actor every morning.
• Webhooks receive a POST the moment a run completes.
• Warehouses pipe directly to BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education Teach a civics class with real congressional data.

🧪 Personal research Track every bill your representative introduces.

🤝 Non-profit and open data Power public dashboards of legislative activity.

🧰 Tinkering Spin up a quick prototype on top of authoritative federal data.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant and ask it to map your workflow to the actor's inputs. The schema, examples, and field list above are everything an LLM needs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Do I need an API key The operator running the actor sets one server-side. End users do nothing.

❓ Which collections are supported All 15+ public collections in the dropdown.

❓ Is there a rate limit Yes, the data.gov tier allows 1,000 requests per hour per key.

❓ Can I get full document text Yes, follow the pdfUrl to the official PDF on govinfo.gov.

❓ How fresh is the data GPO publishes new packages daily.

❓ Can I schedule runs Yes, use Apify's native scheduler.

❓ Is this scraping or API Pure API. Endpoint is official and public.

❓ Will the schema change Stable core fields. New collections are additive.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST endpoint or webhook.

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