US Congress Legislation Intelligence API

Search current U.S. Congress bills and resolutions by keyword using official GovInfo BILLSTATUS data.

This Actor uses official U.S. Government Publishing Office data and does not require a Congress.gov or GovInfo API key.

What you get

Each result can include:

• Congress number
• bill or resolution type and number
• official/display title
• sponsor
• introduced date
• latest action date and text
• policy area
• legislative subjects
• committees
• cosponsor count
• law number when enacted
• CRS summary when available
• canonical Congress.gov URL
• GovInfo BILLSTATUS XML URL
• deterministic search score

Input

{
  "queries": ["artificial intelligence", "data privacy"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 10
}

queries accepts 1–20 keywords. maxResultsPerQuery accepts 1–20 strict-match results per query.

Data source

The Actor downloads the official current-Congress GovInfo BILLSTATUS bulk archives, performs a fast local candidate scan, and fully parses only the candidate legislation needed for the requested queries.

It does not use:

• browser automation
• residential proxies
• third-party scraping APIs
• GovInfo Search API
• DEMO_KEY
• a user-supplied second credential

Relevance

A result is returned only after structured final matching over legislation title, official titles, CRS summary, legislative subjects, and policy area.

The fast raw-byte scan is only a recall-oriented prefilter. It cannot cause a result to enter the Dataset by itself.

Pricing

Pay-per-event pricing:

• Search query: $0.006 per processed keyword.
• Legislation result (primary event):
  • FREE: $0.0038/result
  • BRONZE: $0.0037/result
  • SILVER: $0.0036/result
  • GOLD: $0.0035/result
  • PLATINUM: $0.0035/result
  • DIAMOND: $0.0035/result
• Actor start: $0.00005 per GB of allocated memory as applied by Apify's synthetic Actor-start event.

With six results per query, the effective GOLD-tier price including the query fee is approximately $4.50 per 1,000 returned results.

Spending limits

The Actor reads ACTOR_MAX_TOTAL_CHARGE_USD before downloading bulk data.

It conservatively reserves:

Actor-start cost + $0.006 query fee + maxResultsPerQuery × FREE legislation-result price

for every query it accepts.

If the run budget cannot cover all requested queries at that worst-case bound, only the number of queries that fit is processed.

Current Congress

This version searches the 119th Congress, the current Congress for the 2025–2026 legislative term. GovInfo bulk files are refreshed by the official source as legislation changes.

Reliability notes

The Actor is deterministic for the same source snapshot. GovInfo may update its bulk archives during the day; when source content changes, result rankings can change accordingly.

The Actor is not affiliated with Congress.gov or GovInfo.

Dataset surface

The default Dataset intentionally contains only customer-facing legislation fields. Internal candidate-scan fingerprints, raw matching diagnostics, charge internals, and source ZIP telemetry are not included in Dataset rows.

Operational diagnostics remain in the run summary so they can be inspected without polluting exported bill data.