Connect Congress.gov to Codex
Query Congress.gov directly from Codex. 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 Codex
- 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 codex mcp add arlet --url https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ to add Arlet as an MCP server.
- 3
Codex detects OAuth support and opens your browser. Sign in with Google and click Allow on the consent screen.
- 4
Once connected, both the CLI and the IDE extension can call Arlet tools (the configuration is shared).
If the browser does not open, run codex mcp login arlet to redo the authentication.