Connect Congress.gov to Claude
Query Congress.gov directly from Claude. Arlet links the two through one MCP connection and takes care of API keys.
This server connects your AI client to the Congress.gov API, operated by the Library of Congress - the authoritative source for the status of legislation in the US Congress.
Key features:
- list_bills: recently updated bills and resolutions, filtered by congress number (e.g. 119), bill type (hr, s, hjres, ...) and an update-date window. Useful for monitoring legislative activity.
- get_bill: one bill's detail - title, sponsors with party and state, policy area, latest action, whether it became law and under which public-law numbers, plus counts of actions, cosponsors, committees and amendments, and a link to the human-readable congress.gov page.
- list_bill_actions: the step-by-step legislative history, newest first, including committee referrals and recorded floor votes with roll-call numbers.
One intentional design note: the upstream API has no keyword search. To find bills about a topic, use the GovInfo server's full-text search on the BILLS collection first, then come back here with the congress / bill type / number for status and history. The two servers are designed to be used together.
Using the API requires a free key issued at api.congress.gov/sign-up. Set it as CONGRESS_GOV_API_KEY in your Arlet environment variables.
How to connect Congress.gov to Claude
- 1
In the Arlet dashboard, open Data tools, find Congress.gov, set the API key issued by Congress.gov and switch it on.
- 2
In Claude, open Organization settings → Connectors from the account menu at the bottom left, then click + Add.
- 3
Choose Custom → Web, enter "Arlet" as the Name and https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ as the Remote MCP server URL, then click Add. Authentication settings are auto-detected, so keep the defaults.
- 4
The first time you use it, sign in with Google. After that, every service you switched on in Arlet is available from Claude.
Adding a connector is done by an organization admin on Team / Enterprise plans. On Pro / Max you can add it for yourself from Settings → Connectors with the same steps.