Congressional Documents MCP Server

@pipeworx/congressional-documents

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 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• 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.

Auth

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.

Why this exists

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.

Coverage

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.

A deliberate omission

There is no person-centric tool — nothing that takes a name and returns documents mentioning them. Two reasons:

1. A name is not an identifier. Searching "Epstein" across hearings ranks Anthony C. Epstein, a D.C. Superior Court nominee, first. A person-shaped tool would silently merge unrelated people who share a surname.
2. Appearing in a document is not an allegation. The record names witnesses, staff, cited authors and people mentioned once in passing. A "is X in the record" tool invites a summarizer to collapse was mentioned into was implicated.

Every response carries that disclosure. Please do not add a person→mentions tool; the omission is the design.

Data sources

• https://api.govinfo.gov/search
• https://api.govinfo.gov/packages/{packageId}/granules/{granuleId}/htm

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "congressional-documents": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/congressional-documents/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

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:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_congressional_documents \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"opioid settlement"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_congressional_documents. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-congressional-documents is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/congressional-documents/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "congressional-documents": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-congressional-documents"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

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:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Congressional Documents data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT