The Library of Congress held its sixth annual public forum on access to legislative information on Congress.gov on September 30, 2025. Andrew Weber, product owner of Congress.gov, served as master of ceremonies for a program that ran nearly two hours and drew presenters from the Library, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the House Clerk’s Office, the Secretary of the Senate, the Government Publishing Office (GPO), and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Video of the event is embedded at the bottom of this summary.
Robert Brammer of the Law Library of Congress recapped new enhancements added to Congress.gov over the last year. These included new access to House roll call votes from 2023 to the present that are searchable from the homepage or a member’s profile page. They also are available through a beta API endpoint. A newly released beta display for slip laws using the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) format also is available going back to the 113th Congress.
The Library also added a CRS products collection, which includes all publicly available non-confidential CRS reports, infographics, and testimony by CRS experts in hearings. Users can set up alerts for new CRS products are uploaded that match a search query and filter searches by topic. CRS also launched a revamped appropriations status table on Congress.gov, which links to specific bills, reports, and CRS reports.
The year also saw the addition of several historical collections to Congress.gov. Users can search Senate Executive journals and House journals from the first through 43rd Congresses. Senate journals are available as text files, but metadata is limited. The Library also completed the migration of the Congressional Globe and Annals of Congress (covering 1833 to 1873, including Civil War-era debates) onto the main site. Users also now can browse the statutes at large from 1st through the 81st Congress.
Jay Sweeney, assistant law librarian for collections, followed with an update on the digitization project for the Congressional Serial Set with the Government Publishing Office. The library has inventoried and sent for digitization all of the all roughly 409,110 documents in the set, spanning about 15,000 volumes, with only about 100 fragile or oversized volumes remaining. The Law Library’s U.S. Reports project will expand its free case-opinion coverage through 2017 by year’s end, and its Supreme Court records and briefs digitization — a 27,000-volume collection spanning 1832 to 2012 — has inventoried 55 percent of holdings (14,926 volumes) at the document level, helped by an April cooperative agreement with the University of Washington Law Library.
Arin Shapiro, the Senate’s webmaster, described two new automated feeds: a “Days in Session” XML report generated directly by the Senate Journal Clerk, and an internal API tapping the legislative “clock and buzzer” signal system dating to the 1960s, which the Senate hopes to eventually share with Congress.gov.
GAO’s Mike Tenenbaum and Minsu Kim, senior data scientists in the agency’s Innovation Lab, described how their team scans Congress.gov daily for bills mentioning GAO or containing audit-mandate language, feeding a dashboard to GAO’s congressional relations staff and continuously matching open GAO recommendations against pending legislative text. The lab also developed an in-house generative-AI chatbot can also query Congress.gov’s API directly.
Audience questions, drawn from both the room and the Zoom chat, covered open-source code (not currently available), the limitations of Boolean search, requests for bulk API downloads and consolidated hearing video, and shutdown resilience (Congress.gov and its API are deemed essential services). Several attendees pushed on gaps around committee-level vote data and appropriations line items, which staff acknowledged as unresolved policy and tooling challenges.