About This Website
GovTrack.us is a tool by Civic Impulse, LLC to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting and innovating government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology. You'll find here the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records for the Senate and House of Representatives, information on Members of Congressdistrict maps, as well as congressional committees and the Congressional Record.
The site is a research tool (much like the government website THOMAS but better), but also a free tracking service. Pick up Trackers throughout the site to make a personalized feed or get email updates. You can also embed a few widgets on your own webpage to keep your visitors up to date about legislation.
Innovation and experimentation is also a large part of GovTrack. We have a unique community Q&A system: ask a question about a bill and see if other visitors will provide an answer. That's worked surprisingly well. We also invented an advanced bill text viewer and track tweets about bills.
How it works
The information shown on this site is assembled in an automated way from official websites (primarily from the website THOMAS, the official website for the status of legislation run by the Library of Congress, but a full list of sources is on the credits page). The process of gathering the information is entirely automatic and Congress isn't always very happy to share, so you may find occasional errors here, but we take errors very seriously and work hard to correct them.
The status and text of legislation is usually delayed by about 24 hours and roll call votes usually appear on the site within an hour because we can only get information as fast as the official sites put it online. The statistics are updated at most weekly, and may not be updated during the initial few weeks of the 111th Congress.
Our database also extends into the past. You can search and browse bills going back to the 103rd Congress (1993-94), though the text of legislation goes back only as far as the 106th Congress (1999-2000). Roll call votes are available back to 1990 for the House and 1989 for the Senate, which is as far back as you'll find this information available anywhere online.
Also...
More about the site
An independent, non-partisan, and open-source website launched in September 2004, GovTrack.us was the first website worldwide whose primary goal was to provide comprehensive legislative tracking for everyday citizens by embracing the power of technology such as "Web 2.0" and "open data". GovTrack.us was a 2006 Webby Award nominee, has been mentioned in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and has even been used as a reference in footnotes of a few federal court cases! (See other mentions in the media.) Currently the site is in use by around 30,000 people a day and sends out hundreds to thousands of email updates each night. GovTrack is also a hub of legislative data that is used to power other websites, such as OpenCongress and MAPLight.
This site was created and is run by Joshua Tauberer and became a project of Civic Impulse, LLC when the company was formed in September 2009. By day Josh is a PhD graduate student and also a software developer. Steve Pearson currently moderates the bill Q&A system. GovTrack isn't affiliated with the government or any other group and our only ongoing funding comes from the advertising. We run a modest profit, but the point has never been to make this a business.
To send me a note, email me at . Please don't email me to contact your Member of Congress or to do research for you, though! Also, please don't cite me personally for information you find on this site as the information is derived entirely from other databases. I generally don't do research by hand or exercise any editorial effect over what you see here.
Starting in July 2008, several others have contributed to the development of this site. Daniel Gabriele was responsible for the current look and feel. Kevin Henry developed the interactivity on the new bill text display (supported by a Sunlight Foundation grant). Thanks to Mike Drescher for collecting some images of Members of Congress.
Also...
- In The Press
- Official Merchandise: T-shirts, mousepads, and mugs
- A long list of acknowledgements for ideas, information, money, and software that have made this site what it is.
- About the advertising on this site and how the money is used. GovTrack is noncommercial, but there are ads. I explain.
- The Wikipedia entry on GovTrack. Would you help others keep that page up to date?
- About the all-seeing-eye logo
GovTrack supports open knowledge. We're an open-source project and we share the data we gather. For more:
- Developer Information including source data, APIs, source code, and community information.
- The mail list for discussion of site development and other work in civic technology.
- A list of other websites using data from GovTrack.
Link to us!
Here's a button image you could use to link to GovTrack:
