US Government APIs?

Question

I'm working on an app to provide an easy way for people to track the status of a bill [and various other political information]. I love the idea of OpenCongress, for instance, which surfaces summary information on legislation as it navigates the political process, but I'd like it if it had a tag-based search system and some other rich search options, as well as more conveniently accessible voting history and term information. And while they now have JavaScript widgets which show the current status of bills you select, I think more could be done in this regard.

I don't know where they get their data, though, and while they have an API of their own, I don't know whether sticking a wart onto it is the best way of implementing what I envision. For all its touting of transparency, it's not at all obvious to me what data the government makes available, or even how to find that out!

So, does anyone know any good APIs for obtaining information on the status of American legislation, legislators (such as voting histories), agencies and/or upcoming elections? (Or, if you think it's really interesting, feel free to post any other APIs that are relevant to U.S. politics.)

Answer 1

Although they aren't APIs, www.data.gov provides official data sets, which can be mined. For now, I think this is the closest you're going to get to an official, centralized source of data.

Check out ProgrammableWeb's list of government-related APIs. Not all of them are the US federal government, so you might need to sift through it a bit. Also, they're not all provided directly by the government.

There's also an open source project that provides an API for thomas.loc.gov.

Answer 2

We publish feeds of all legislative information for the New York State Senate, with an API, at: http://open.nysenate.gov/legislation/developers

Answer 3

I'm not sure if it addresses exactly your concerns but the Watchdog site tries to do something like this. Their source is available online and they extract a lot of information from public records. A lot of the published stuff is in rather antiquated formats (huge zipped XML files) and so the whole process is not totally straightforward.