The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Congressional Documents listing page.
Full-text search and retrieval over the official record of Congress — hearing transcripts, committee reports and the Congressional Record. Platform key (data.gov), BYO accepted.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.
search_congressional_documents(...) — search the full text of hearings, committee reports, committee prints, House/Senate documents and the Congressional Record. doc_type takes plain words ("hearings", "reports", "record").get_congressional_document_text(...) — the actual document text, with its page citation and govinfo.gov URL, paged via offset/next_offset (a hearing runs ~200k characters).list_congressional_document_types(...) — what each document type contains, and what this source covers. Keyless.Platform key (PLATFORM_DATAGOV_KEY), or BYO via _apiKey. Free, instant signup at https://api.data.gov/signup — one key works across GovInfo and most federal APIs.
All of this is reachable through the govinfo pack, but only as search_packages({collections:"CHRG"}) and list_granules. No model asked "what was said in the congressional hearing about X" will reach for a granule API or know that CHRG means hearings. The data was never missing; the path to it was.
It exists for grounding: this corpus is voluminous, badly structured and heavily paraphrased second-hand, which makes it exactly what models confabulate about. Every result carries the package/granule id, the official citation and a govinfo.gov URL so an answer can quote rather than recall.
Published documents only. A hearing transcript appears months after the hearing. Ad-hoc releases a committee posts to its own website never reach GovInfo at all — use search_committee_documents (committee-releases) for those.
page_citation is a Congressional Record convention ([Pages S6557-S6559]); hearings do not carry one, so it is legitimately null there.
There is no person-centric tool — nothing that takes a name and returns documents mentioning them. Two reasons:
Every response carries that disclosure. Please do not add a person→mentions tool; the omission is the design.
https://api.govinfo.gov/searchhttps://api.govinfo.gov/packages/{packageId}/granules/{granuleId}/htmAdd to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/congressional-documents/mcp returns the tools in the table
above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx,
discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.
This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.
Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT