Connect Congress.gov to Copilot Studio
Query Congress.gov directly from Copilot Studio. 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 Copilot Studio
- 1
In the Arlet dashboard, open Data tools, find Congress.gov, set the API key issued by Congress.gov and switch it on.
- 2
Sign in to Copilot Studio with your work account, create a new agent (or open an existing one), and in the Build tab choose Tools → + → Add → Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the right panel.
- 3
In the Add MCP server form, enter "Arlet" as the Server name, https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ as the Server URL, choose OAuth 2.0 for Authentication and "Dynamic (detected)" for Configuration type, then click Add. No Client ID / Secret is needed.
- 4
On the Select a connection screen, choose Create new connection → Create, then sign in with Google on the Arlet authorization screen and click Allow. Click Add to attach the tool to the agent, then Publish to use it from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Requires a Microsoft work account and a Copilot Studio license (or trial). MCP is available only for agents using generative orchestration and not in Copilot Studio in Teams.