The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the CRS Reports listing page.
Congressional Research Service reports — Congress's own nonpartisan analysis of statutes, federal programmes and policy options — searchable by subject and readable in full, with each report's authority, citations, licence and age stated on every response.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.
crs_search(query?, topic?, product_class?, author?, published_since?, published_before?, limit?)
— ranked search over report titles and the summaries CRS publishes with them.
Returns titles, report numbers, CRS subject topics, authors, publication dates
and a summary snippet. Ranks titles and summaries, not report bodies — that
boundary is stated in every response as searched, because a miss otherwise
reads as "CRS has never written about this".crs_report(report_id, include_text?, max_chars?) — one report in full by its
number (R43255, IF13006, LSB10123). Returns the complete current-version
text plus authors, topics, the bills and public laws it cites, and its age.crs_recent(days?, topic?, product_class?, limit?) — what CRS has published or
revised lately, newest first. The change feed, for tracking the analysis that
follows a bill or a rule.crs_topics(facet?, limit?) — CRS's own subject taxonomy with per-term counts,
plus analysts and product families. Call it before filtering: CRS writes
U.S. Trade Policy, and a guessed Trade matches nothing.On the Pipeworx gateway: keyless. The gateway injects the corpus — the report index and the extracted report text — so a gateway call needs nothing from the caller.
Standalone (npm i @pipeworx/mcp-crs-reports): bring an api.data.gov key. A
standalone install has neither half of the corpus, so the pack falls back to the
Library of Congress's own API and needs a key for it. Pass it as _apiKey on any
tool call; keys are free at https://api.data.gov/signup/ and one key works
across every api.data.gov-fronted API. With no corpus and no key every tool
returns {found: false, reason: "corpus_unavailable"} and says so.
Every response carries mode: corpus (hosted) or live_api (standalone with a
key). What live mode cannot do — stated on the response rather than silently
degraded:
mode: "corpus" | mode: "live_api" | |
|---|---|---|
crs_report text | full extracted report text, checksum-verified | CRS's own summary only, never under the name text; the body stays in the PDF at pdf_url |
crs_search scope | every title and summary, ranked | titles only, scanned from the newest-updated end (the list endpoint has no query parameter at all); the response states how many it read against the corpus total |
topic / author filters | yes | refused by name — they exist only on the per-report record, so honouring one would cost a request per report across 14,000 reports |
crs_topics | full vocabulary with per-term counts | product_class only, without counts |
The refusals are deliberate. An unfiltered list returned under a filtered question is the wrong answer wearing the right label, and a 3,700-character summary sitting in the field where a 61,000-character report belongs is the one substitution a caller would never notice.
If the corpus fails mid-call and the caller supplied _apiKey, the answer
comes from the live API instead and carries degraded_from_corpus saying so.
CRS analysis is persuasive, never binding. It is not law, it binds no court
and no agency, and it is cited as background and legislative context. Every
response carries authority.binding_status: "persuasive" and a binding_note
saying this in words, so a downstream agent cannot mistake a CRS explanation of
a statute for the statute.
The set is the currently-active one, 2018 to today — 14,115 reports at the time of writing, which is what CRS presently lists as active rather than the full historical archive. A report withdrawn or superseded by CRS leaves the set.
Licence: none needed. CRS reports are works of the US federal government and
17 U.S.C. §105 puts them outside copyright, so license_terms.encumbered is
false and no attribution is required. The one caveat, which CRS prints itself and
this pack repeats in license_caveat: an individual report may reproduce a
third-party chart or photograph, and §105 does not reach those.
Worth knowing before touching the ingest (scripts/ingest-crs-reports.mjs):
sort is accepted and ignored. sort=updateDate+asc, sort=updateDate+desc
and a nonsense parameter all return the same first row. The list is always
newest-first by updateDate. Nothing errors, so ordering built on sort is
wrong and looks right.fromDateTime / toDateTime do work, and they filter on updateDate —
14,115 unfiltered against 585 for fromDateTime=2026-09-01. That pair is the
change feed that keeps the daily pass incremental.updateDate is an America/New_York wall time wearing a Z. Fourteen
sampled reports each had a PDF Last-Modified exactly 4h (EDT) or 5h (EST)
after their updateDate, to the second; the DST correlation is what rules out
a fixed publishing lag. The PDF's header is the same event in real UTC and is
what gets stored.updateDate (2025-09-08T11:20:24Z). That is an
unstable tiebreak — ordering is by updateDate alone and thousands of rows
share a stamp from one bulk republication — so about as many reports are
skipped as repeated while the count looks perfect. The ingest collapses
duplicates and walks again.list.version 1 / list.updateDate 22:09:04 against currentVersion 6 /
updateDate 22:38:57. Enumerate from the list; take every value from the
detail record./crs_external_products/<T>/HTML/<id>.html path answers 403 with
Cf-Mitigated: challenge from Worker egress and from a laptop, with and
without a full browser header set. The PDF path answers 200 from both. A bare
HEAD on the PDF gets 403 where GET gets 200, so a HEAD-only probe condemns
the working path.summary is the whole document for short products and only the summary for
long ones. R43255 is 3,754 characters of summary against 61,691 of report.
text_source on every response says which rendition the text came from.Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/crs-reports/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 1679+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/crs_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.
This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:
Or run it directly to confirm it starts:
It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call
for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.
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