Congress.gov Bill Lookup
congressgov_bill_lookupRead-onlyIdempotent
Browse and retrieve U.S. legislative bill data from Congress.gov. Discover bills by filtering on congress, bill type, and date range — there is no keyword search. Use 'list' to browse (requires congress, defaults to most-recently-updated first), 'get' for full bill detail (sponsor, policy area, CBO estimates, law info), or drill into a specific bill with 'actions', 'amendments', 'cosponsors', 'committees', 'subjects', 'summaries', 'text', 'titles', or 'related' (each requires congress + billType + billNumber). 'text' lists the published versions and their format URLs; 'content' then reads one version's actual text, a bounded character window at a time.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | Results per page (1-250). | |
| order | No | Sort order for 'list' (sorts by update date). 'recent' (default) is newest first; 'oldest' is ascending. Ignored by other operations. | recent |
| format | No | Document format for 'content'. 'text' is GPO's Formatted Text — plain, pre-formatted print output, published for every document checked. 'xml' prefers United States Legislative Markup and falls back to Formatted XML; it exists on some bill text versions and on no committee report or Congressional Record article. PDF is not retrieved — read one at the format URLs 'text'/'articles' return. | text |
| offset | No | Pagination offset. | |
| billType | No | Bill type code. Required for get and sub-resource operations. | |
| congress | Yes | Congress number (e.g., 118, 119). | |
| operation | Yes | Which data to retrieve. | |
| billNumber | No | Bill number. Required for get and sub-resource operations. Accepts the digit-string form list rows carry (e.g. "9479") as well as a number. | |
| toDateTime | No | End of date range filter (ISO 8601). Same field semantics as fromDateTime. | |
| fromDateTime | No | Start of date range filter (ISO 8601). Filters by the bill's update date — when Congress.gov last touched the record — not by the bill's latest legislative action. | |
| characterLimit | No | Maximum characters to return for 'content' (1-100000). Legislative documents run past a million characters, so a full bill takes several windows. | |
| characterOffset | No | First character to return for 'content', 0-based. Offsets are exact and are never snapped to a section or paragraph break, so feeding the response's nextOffset back walks the whole document with every character returned exactly once. | |
| textVersionIndex | No | Which text version 'content' reads, 0-based against the same order 'text' returns — 0 is the most recent version. Ignored by other operations. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| bill | No | Dynamic upstream JSON record. | |
| data | No | Result rows. Per-tool item shape is rendered in the markdown body. | |
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| notice | No | Guidance when results are empty, a page is past the end, or a caveat applies. | |
| content | No | Dynamic upstream JSON record. | |
| pagination | No | Pagination metadata: total count and next offset. | |
| totalCount | No | Total results across all pages. | |
| effectiveQuery | No | The browse scope and applied filters. |