Transparency in government is key for a healthy representative democracy.
GovTrack.us is a nexus of information about the United States Congress. Bringing together information on the status of federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional data from official sources, and turning it into an understandable and trackable free information resource for everyday citizens, GovTrack aims to narrow the divide between the public and our government. This site serves as both a research tool as well as a customizable Congress-tracker, by providing email updates and RSS/Atom feeds for all aspects of Congress.
An independent, non-partisan, non-commercial website founded in September 2004, GovTrack.us was a 2006 Webby Award nominee and has been mentioned in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. GovTrack was inspired by other websites, such as Project Vote Smart, OpenSecrets, and the commercial CapWiz, but was the first website to provide comprehensive legislative tracking for everyday citizens and the first congressional transparency website to embrace Web 2.0 and principles of open data.
The data shown on this site is assembled in an entirely automated way from official data sources, primarily from the website THOMAS, the official website for the status of legislation run by the Library of Congress.
As a research tool, GovTrack indexes all bills in the Congress and all roll call votes. You can search bills by name, number, and subject, and can track bills and votes by RSS feeds. The full text of legislation shows the changes made to the bill through the legislative process and includes links directly to relevant parts of the United States Code. Legislative events, like the introduction of a bill or the vote on a bill, are automatically categorized into thousands of subject areas, such as "nuclear energy" and "medicine," so that users can subscribe to follow just the events that interest them. These events are sent to users on a daily or weekly basis by email, or through daily-updated RSS/Atom feeds. To get started, understand how to use "Trackers" or search bills by subject. You can also use GovTrack to track your senators and representative. Start by finding your representatives with our Google Maps mash-up.
Some acknowledgements are due to other sites as well that have inspired various components of this site: RichmondSunlight for how the status of legislation is displayed on bill pages, WashingtonWatch for showing costs-per-taxpayer of legislation. I'm sure I have drawn ideas from many other places too.
GovTrack is an open source project, which means that the inner workings of this site are completely transparent and open for revision --- just like we want the government to be! Although the site is just maintained by one person at the moment (see below), I hope others will become involved. Further, we believe information about the government should be free and open. In that spirit, all of the raw data that GovTrack collects and organizes is made available for others to reuse to create other projects; that is, to make the same information as useful and accessible as possible.
Who runs GovTrack.us?
This site was created by and is maintained by Joshua Tauberer. I'm a graduate student studying linguistics (yes, neither politics nor computer science) at the University of Pennsylvania. GovTrack isn't affiliated with the government or any other group. It's just a pet project of mine. To send me a note, email me at the address shown at the bottom of this page. Please don't email me to contact your Member of Congress or to do research for you, though!
Since the site is labeled as non-commercial, you may be wondering about the advertising on the site. I think the right way to look at it is this: I have no intention to ever manage the site with the goal of turning a profit, but if I can bring in some money all the same, without conflicting with the fundamental purpose of the site, then I should take advantage of that. You can read more about the advertising. Your thoughts on the matter are most welcome.
Where does GovTrack get its information?
Information is retrieved from a variety of government websites, primarily THOMAS and also sites listed on this page, on a daily basis. The status of legislation is usually delayed by about 24 hours, and roll call votes usually appear on the site within an hour.
Though the process is entirely automatic, there may be errors because the U.S. government does not provide this information in a way that makes it easy to fetch the information using automated computer processes. For instance, THOMAS and the chamber websites refer to some congressmen with different first names (e.g. Tom versus Thomas). GovTrack has been programmed to do its best to figure out what these websites are conveying, but the process is not perfect. Also, some legislative status updates are missed because no computer-processable list of legislation with recent activity is made available by THOMAS, although they have such a list internally. (If you want THOMAS to provide better support for websites like GovTrack, contact the THOMAS web team!)
Link to us!
Here's a banner image you could use to link to GovTrack:
