Connect Congress.gov to Claude Code
Query Congress.gov directly from Claude Code. 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 Code
- 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 your terminal, run claude mcp add --transport http arlet https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ to add Arlet as an MCP server.
- 3
Start Claude Code, run /mcp, select arlet and click Authenticate.
- 4
Your browser opens. Sign in with Google and click Allow on the consent screen. The connection is complete.
The connection is per user and works across every project on the same machine.