Congressional Tech
Building practical tools that reduce technological roadblocks for congressional staff and make legislative activity easier for the public to understand.
Content owner: Civic Tech DC organizing team. Last reviewed: July 26, 2026.
Congressional Tech builds practical tools for congressional staff while making legislative activity easier for constituents and the public to understand. The work spans small utilities, data projects, and proposals, but the mission remains concrete: remove common technological roadblocks in and around Congress.
Requests from people who work with Congress
The project began with needs gathered from congressional staff during the Annual Congressional Hackathon. The American Governance Institute organized those requests and brought them to Civic Tech DC. The current Congressional Tech repository describes the work as a continuing partnership between the two organizations.
The project has also sought opportunities to work with technical teams in and around Congress, including the House Digital Service. This page does not treat that outreach as an active partnership or official relationship. The project is not a House, Senate, or federal-government service.
What the portfolio includes
Congressional staff and people following Congress work across public APIs, committee pages, videos, spreadsheets, calendars, and documents. Congressional Tech organizes proposals and prototypes around those workflows.
Current repository work includes:
- tools that connect congressional committee videos with hearing and event records;
- committee and hearing metadata processing;
- an inflation calculator for Google Sheets;
- structured-data and deadline concepts;
- a public catalog of project proposals and working tools.
Two proposals are described in the repository as working tools: the committee YouTube coverage dashboard and the Google Sheets inflation calculator. Other entries remain proposals or prototypes.
Current status
Congressional Tech is active, DMV-based, and open for national reuse. Its repository contains current code, data-processing packages, a public website, and a larger proposal backlog.
- Different tools have different levels of completeness and user validation.
- Public legislative sources can change, omit identifiers, or disagree.
- The project does not claim endorsement by Congress or any congressional office.
- It has not published verified measures of staff adoption, time saved, constituent use, or institutional outcomes.
Each proposed tool needs a specific workflow, reliable source data, people who will test it, and someone prepared to maintain or retire it.
Join Congressional Tech
Congressional staff, legislative-data practitioners, journalists, researchers, and civic organizations can bring a workflow to the team. Volunteers can help with web scraping, data modeling, public APIs, browser extensions, Google application integrations, documentation, user research, and project coordination.
Use the GitHub and Slack links above to join the work. You can also meet the community at a Project Night or bring Civic Tech DC a related legislative workflow.