congressgov mcp server

Public Hosted Server: https://congressgov.caseyjhand.com/mcp

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Tools

Eleven read-only tools for querying U.S. legislative data:

Tool	Description
congressgov_bill_lookup	Browse and retrieve U.S. legislative bill data — actions, sponsors, summaries, text, related bills
congressgov_enacted_laws	Browse enacted public and private laws by congress
congressgov_member_lookup	Discover congressional members by state/district/congress, retrieve legislative portfolios
congressgov_committee_lookup	Browse congressional committees and their legislation, reports, and nominations
congressgov_roll_votes	Retrieve House and Senate roll call votes and individual member voting positions
congressgov_senate_nominations	Browse presidential nominations to federal positions and track the Senate confirmation process
congressgov_bill_summaries	Browse recent CRS bill summaries — the "what's happening" feed
congressgov_crs_reports	Browse and retrieve nonpartisan CRS policy analysis reports
congressgov_committee_reports	Browse and retrieve committee reports accompanying legislation
congressgov_daily_record	Browse the daily Congressional Record — floor speeches, debates, and proceedings
congressgov_search_bills	Keyword-search bill titles and CRS summaries via a local full-text mirror (opt-in, off by default)

congressgov_bill_lookup

Browse and retrieve U.S. legislative bill data from Congress.gov.

• Filter by congress number, bill type, and update-date range
• Retrieve detailed sub-resources: actions, amendments, committees, cosponsors, related bills, subjects, summaries, text versions, and titles
• content reads a text version's actual document text, a bounded character window at a time — pick the version with textVersionIndex, the window with characterOffset/characterLimit, and follow nextOffset to walk a full bill
• list defaults to order='recent' (newest update-date first); pass order='oldest' for ascending
• Pagination support for browsing large result sets

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congressgov_member_lookup

Discover congressional members and their legislative activity.

• Browse by state, district, congress number, and chamber
• Retrieve a member's sponsored and cosponsored legislation
• Look up specific members by bioguide ID

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congressgov_committee_lookup

Browse congressional committees and their legislation, reports, and nominations.

• Filter by chamber (House, Senate, Joint)
• Retrieve committee bills, reports, and nominations
• Detail and sub-resource lookups need only committeeCode — chamber is auto-detected from the code
• Committee bills default to order='recent' (newest-first); pass order='oldest' for ascending update-date order

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congressgov_roll_votes

Retrieve House and Senate roll call votes and individual member voting positions.

• Set chamber to house (default, from the Congress.gov API) or senate (from the Senate's official LIS feed — the API exposes no Senate votes)
• list browses votes by congress and session, newest first; pass order='oldest' for ascending
• get returns the question, result, tallies, party breakdown, and associated bill/nomination/amendment
• members returns each member's recorded position

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congressgov_bill_summaries

Browse recent CRS bill summaries.

• Filter by congress and bill type
• Browse chronologically to see what's moving through Congress

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congressgov_crs_reports

Browse and retrieve CRS reports — nonpartisan policy analyses written by subject-matter experts at the Library of Congress.

• Browse the full report catalog
• Retrieve individual reports by product number

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congressgov_daily_record

Browse the daily Congressional Record — floor speeches, debates, and legislative text published each day Congress is in session.

• Browse volumes by congress number
• Retrieve specific issue articles
• content reads one article's actual text, selected by articleIndex and bounded by characterOffset/characterLimit

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congressgov_search_bills

Keyword-search bill titles and CRS summaries against a local full-text mirror — the discovery path the Congress.gov API itself lacks.

• Opt-in: off by default, and not offered to clients until CONGRESS_MIRROR_ENABLED=true. With the flag set but the index not yet built (bun run mirror:init), the tool is callable and answers with an empty result and a build-the-index notice
• Narrow with congress, billType, and originChamber filters
• Returns BM25-ranked matches with each bill's derived id, ready for a follow-up congressgov_bill_lookup call

Resources

URI Pattern	Description
congress://current	Current congress number, session dates, chamber info
congress://bill-types	Reference table of valid bill type codes
congress://member/{bioguideId}	Member profile by bioguide ID
congress://bill/{congress}/{billType}/{billNumber}	Bill detail by congress, type, and number
congress://committee/{committeeCode}	Committee detail by committee code

Prompts

Prompt	Description
congressgov_bill_analysis	Structured framework for analyzing a bill
congressgov_legislative_research	Research framework for a policy area across Congress

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core:

• Declarative tool definitions — single file per tool, framework handles registration and validation
• Unified error handling across all tools
• Pluggable auth (none, jwt, oauth)
• Swappable storage backends: in-memory, filesystem, Supabase
• Structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing
• Runs locally (stdio/HTTP) or in Docker from the same codebase

Congress.gov-specific:

• Type-safe client for the Congress.gov REST API v3
• Optional API key from api.data.gov — defaults to DEMO_KEY (30 req/hr); own key gets 5,000 req/hr
• Automatic pagination and response normalization
• Rate limiting awareness
• All tools are read-only and idempotent

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://congressgov.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "congressgov-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://congressgov.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "congressgov-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/congressgov-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "CONGRESS_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "congressgov-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/congressgov-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "CONGRESS_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Get a free API key at api.data.gov/signup for 5,000 req/hr. Without a key the server falls back to DEMO_KEY (30 req/hr).

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.3.2 or higher.

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/congressgov-mcp-server.git

1. Navigate into the directory:

cd congressgov-mcp-server

1. Install dependencies:

bun install

Configuration

All configuration is validated at startup via Zod schemas in src/config/server-config.ts. Key environment variables:

Variable	Description	Default
CONGRESS_API_KEY	Optional. API key from api.data.gov. Omit to use DEMO_KEY (30 req/hr); own key: 5,000 req/hr.	DEMO_KEY
CONGRESS_API_BASE_URL	Congress.gov API base URL	https://api.congress.gov/v3
MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE	Transport: stdio or http	stdio
MCP_HTTP_PORT	HTTP server port	3010
MCP_AUTH_MODE	Authentication: none, jwt, or oauth	none
MCP_SESSION_MODE	HTTP session mode: auto, stateful, or stateless. This server holds no per-session state; the Docker image runs stateless.	auto (resolves to stateful)
MCP_LOG_LEVEL	Log level (debug, info, warning, error, etc.)	info
LOGS_DIR	Directory for log files (Node.js only).	<project-root>/logs
STORAGE_PROVIDER_TYPE	Storage backend	in-memory
OTEL_ENABLED	Enable OpenTelemetry instrumentation (spans, metrics, completion logs)	false

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run the production version:

  bun run rebuild
  bun run start:http   # or start:stdio
  

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck     # Lints, formats, type-checks
  bun run test         # Runs test suite
  

Docker

docker build -t congressgov-mcp-server .
docker run -e CONGRESS_API_KEY=your-api-key -p 3010:3010 congressgov-mcp-server

Project structure

Directory	Purpose
src/mcp-server/tools/definitions/	Tool definitions (*.tool.ts). Eleven Congress.gov tools.
src/mcp-server/resources/definitions/	Resource definitions. Congress, bill, member, and committee resources.
src/mcp-server/prompts/definitions/	Prompt definitions. Bill analysis and legislative research prompts.
src/services/congress-api/	Congress.gov API client — auth, pagination, rate limiting.
src/config/	Server-specific environment variable parsing and validation with Zod.
tests/	Unit and integration tests, mirroring the src/ structure.

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic
• Use ctx.log for logging, ctx.state for storage
• All tools are read-only with readOnlyHint: true and idempotentHint: true

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file for details.