FEC Campaign Finance Intelligence 🔍💰

Search and normalize US Federal Election Commission campaign finance data — individual contributions, committee details, and candidate filings. Powered by the official FEC API (free, no API key required).

✨ Features

• Individual Contributions — search by donor name, employer, or occupation
• Committee Search — find PACs, campaign committees, and party committees
• Candidate Lookup — search active candidates by name
• Data Normalization — employer names standardized, committee names cleaned, occupations categorized into industry groups
• Rich Stats — aggregate metrics on donation totals, top donors, party breakdowns, and more

📊 Example Output

===========================================================================================
  FEC CAMPAIGN FINANCE: INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS
===========================================================================================
  Search:        Tesla
  Retrieved:     50 contributions (of 14,892 total)
  Data source:   api.open.fec.gov (Federal Election Commission)

  #  Donor                  Amount       Date         Employer                Committee
 ─── ──────────────────── ──────────── ────────────  ──────────────────────  ────────────────────────
  1  Elon Musk            $50,000.00   2025-03-15   Tesla                   Nrsc
  2  Elon Musk            $44,600.00   2024-06-30   Tesla                   Elon Musk Victory
  3  Zachary Kirkhorn      $5,800.00   2024-03-20   Tesla                   Nrcc
  ...

🔧 Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
searchType	select	Search type: contributions, committees, or candidates	contributions
searchQuery	string	Required. Search term (name, employer, committee)	—
contributorFilter	select	(Contributions only) Field to search within	All fields
twoYearTransactionPeriod	integer	Election cycle year (e.g. 2026 = 2025-2026)	2026
maxResults	integer	Max results (1-500)	100
apiKey	string	Optional data.gov API key for higher limits	DEMO_KEY

Example Input

{
  "searchType": "contributions",
  "searchQuery": "Tesla",
  "contributorFilter": "contributor_employer",
  "twoYearTransactionPeriod": 2026,
  "maxResults": 50
}

🏷️ Data Normalization

This actor goes beyond raw API passthrough:

• Employer names — 40+ known companies mapped to canonical names (e.g. "GOOGLE INC" → "Google (Alphabet)")
• Committee names — legal suffixes stripped, abbreviations standardized
• Occupation categorization — free-text occupation mapped to 12 industry categories (Finance, Tech, Legal, Healthcare, etc.)
• Party/State expansion — codes expanded to full names (e.g. "REP" → "Republican Party", "CA" → "California")
• Deduplication — normalized names prevent duplicate entities

🎯 Use Cases

• Journalists — investigate campaign finance patterns and donor networks
• Political campaigns — research competitor fundraising
• NGOs & Watchdogs — track money in politics
• Financial analysts — monitor corporate political spending
• Researchers — academic analysis of campaign contributions

📡 Data Source

All data comes from the official FEC API provided by the US Federal Election Commission. The API is free and open — no registration required for basic use. For higher rate limits, register for a free data.gov API key.

Data is updated regularly as committees file their reports with the FEC.

🚀 Quick Start

1. Enter a search query (company name, person, or committee)
2. Choose your search type and filters
3. Run the Actor — results appear in your dataset with normalized, clean data

No API key needed — just search and go!