d. We love the legislative branch (i.e., Congress). That’s why we think about it so much.

b. We believe that the best outcomes can be achieved not only with an informed public but also with a Congress that has the capacity to make informed decisions.

a. We believe that transparency and education are crucial for achieving equity in rights and representation for all Americans.

c. We do not accept grants from partisan organizations. Our advertising space is made available to all advertisers without regard to political views.

b. We never misrepresent or exclude information to favor one side. We never side for or against any policy, politician, or organization — except policies that further our mission as described in this charter.

a. We know that government decisions have grave consequences, and so we carry out our work respectfully and responsibly.

d. GovTrack.us and the information we publish will always be free to view, use, and share by anyone.

c. We actively seek out any information relevant to our mission and new ways to analyze and explain that information.

b. We do this by putting the information in context, tracking new developments on issues our users care about, and helping our users take action to make a meaningful difference.

a. We make information about the United States Congress accessible, understandable, and actionable for public use.

1. GovTrack.us’s mission is to help Americans participate in their government.

Amy has been the GovTrack research and communications manager since February 2017 when she realized she didn't want to retire quite so early after all. She edits GovTrack Insider articles, posts to GovTrack social media and developed the Congressional Misconduct Database . From 1999-2015, she was a librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries specializing in government publications and government data.

Ben is our external relations associate. He has assisted managing site content and fundraising for three years, working to develop new partnerships and projects. Among his many contributions to the site, Ben was responsible for our bill and vote study guides, adding legislator press releases to bill pages, and collecting congressional scorecards from advocacy organizations. He occasionally represents GovTrack on Capitol Hill and publishes annual updates on our work. Outside of work, he draws comics.

Joshua is the founder of GovTrack.us and created the site initially as a hobby in 2004. He is a software engineer and entrepreneur that has also been a contractor for the United States Congress and the District of Columbia municipal government on improving the publication process of the law. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

We’re a small organization with four part-time staff members, who are:

GovTrack.us began in 2004 and inspired the world-wide open government and open government data movements. We have testified before Congress multiple times about our work and how to make Congress a more open institution.

GovTrack.us is a project of Civic Impulse, LLC , a completely independent entity which is wholly owned by its operator and receives no funding in any form from outside organizations. We have no financers, sponsors, investors, or partners, nor do we have any affiliation or relationship (financial or otherwise) with any political party, government agency, or any other outside group or persons.

You can read more about the data we have , including how you can get it. GovTrack was the first to create comprehensive open data about Congress, and we have successfully lobbied Congress to make more and better legislative information available to the public.

Use GovTrack to track bills for updates by getting alerts and understand the broader context of legislation through our statistical analyses . Read our original research on GovTrack Insider and in our congressional misconduct database .

What you can do on GovTrack

We publish the status of federal legislation, information about your representative and senators in Congress including voting records, and original research on legislation. We’re one of the oldest government transparency websites in the world. Read about our most recent developments in our annual update for GovTrack supporters.

GovTrack.us tracks the United States Congress and helps Americans participate in their national legislature.

2004 Bill status alerts by email GovTrack launched in 2004 with our most fundamental feature: email alerts for legislation and lawmakers you care about. Ideology scores Our first data analysis, Ideology Scores put legislators on a chart from conservative to liberal based on their sponsorship of legislation.

2005 Downloadable raw data In support of other civic tech projects, we shared our downloadable data and, later, an API, for others to use to create new apps and research projects. Congressional district maps It was one of the first “Google Maps mashups” and the first interactive street-level map of congressional districts on the internet, our congressional district maps help you find your representative. (These days our maps use MapBox technology — thanks MapBox for the discount!)

2006 Committee assignments Our early years were spent gathering more and more legislative information into one place, including legislators’ committee assignments.

2007 Asked Congress for open data We went to the U.S. Capitol to ask Congress for open legislative data

2008 Paragraph-level bill permalinks Bills can be thousands of pages long — use our paragraph-level links, launched in 2008, to bring your followers directly to the part of the bill you care about ( example ). Bills can change lots during the legislative process. We give you a way to see those changes. Here’s a comparison of the introduced and passed versions of the Pallone-Thune Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act.

2009 It’s official In 2009, we formed Civic Impulse LLC, a company in the District of Columbia. Senate creates open data for voting records Following our path, the Senate began publishing open data for votes

2010 Incorporated into the House Democrats’ intranet Our open data became a part of the House Democrats’ internal tool for keeping their caucus informed. Videos As an experiment that ran from 2010-2013, we created some videos explaining legislative issues. However, videos turned out to be unfeasibly labor-intensive to make.

2013 Legislator report cards Extending the legislator statistics we started with in 2004, the report cards are much more expansive and give a more nuanced view of each legislator. We began including the Library of Congress’s bill summaries in 2008, but we began writing our own in 2013. ( example ) We also included lightly edited summaries from the Republican Policy Committee from 2013-2018. Unfortunately, Democrats did not have a similar site to copy from, and the Republicans have stopped publishing theirs. In January 2013, 1 million users visited our site — a record. Seen on TV! The McLaughlin Group and The Rachel Maddow Show both mentioned our work.

2017 Bill text incorporation Smaller bills are often passed as part of larger packages . Tracing that path can be very difficult. This feature simplifies that process for you. It also lets us give legislators credit where due that would otherwise be hidden by procedure. Here’s a link to one bill which we show incorporates 89 other bills. People often go to organizations that support their views to find out which politicians they believe work to their benefit. We’ve gathered a number of major advocacy organizations’ ratings of legislators so you can see them all together. Congressional Misconduct Database Congress mostly polices itself and has done so since 1789. We have gathered what we believe is the only database of all instances of Congressional Misconduct Our fact-check of President Trump’s bogus claim that he signed more legislation than anyone — in fact, it was the least — made national news. Four team members In 2017 we increased the size of our team to four regular team members. 1,500,000 users in a month In January 2017, just under 1.5 million users visited our site and 9.7 million people visited our site that year — a record. End of our open data Happily, we were able to retire our open data and API because Congress created their own and other organizations created similar APIs.

2018 Pronunciation guide Perhaps you too had thought that former Rep. Goodlatte’s name was pronounced like the coffee drink. It is not. Our guide can be very helpful if you’re calling your representative for the first time! Our 500,000th registered user The 500,000th person to sign up for email updates registered this year.

2019 Testified before Congress On May 10, 2019, GovTrack.us founder Joshua Tauberer testified before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress on the subject of transparency. Every bill page now features a unique set of questions to help you understand the bill, under the “study guides” tab. These questions can be used in the classroom to guide discussion about a bill, or can be helpful templates for what to ask when you call your representatives. Impeachment.guide We launched a spin-off site Impeachment.guide to track the chronology and charges in the impeachment of President Trump.