Requests to api.congress.gov/v3 now spin into an infinite redirect loop, and the system for generating new keys — the required entry point for new users — is also broken. The issue was discussed by a number of users on GitHub starting Friday.
This means no one can sign up to start using the tool, and those already on board can’t get the data they need. Automated access to congressional information has effectively been cut off, with no public word from the Library of Congress about whether this is a temporary technical issue, intentional downtime or something more troubling.
The outage is more than an inconvenience for developers. The Congress.gov API launched in September 2022 and was introduced as a major milestone for legislative transparency. In a blog post introducing the tool, the Library of Congress explained that while Congress.gov has long been “a fantastic source of legislative information” and “a marvelous source for investigating specific legislation and exploring the legislative history of a bill,” many users wanted deeper access. Before the API, researchers and developers often had to scrape the site or rely on bulk data downloads from the Government Publishing Office — sometimes considered an imperfect workaround.
The API changed that by offering structured, reliable access. As a REST API, it allows applications to request congressional data and receive it back in XML or JSON, giving developers a consistent way to integrate official information into tools and dashboards. At launch, it covered bills, amendments, summaries, members, the Congressional Record, committee reports, nominations, treaties and House communications. The Library of Congress promised more to come back in 2022, with future endpoints planned for hearing transcripts and Senate communications. To support users, the initial rollout also included documentation, user guides and even a GitHub issues page where problems could be reported and discussed.
That same GitHub issues page lit up in recent days as word of the outage spread — not surprising given that the API functions as a critical pipeline of official data for civic-tech projects, watchdog tools and academic research. Without it, developers may find difficulty building apps that track bill status in real time, journalists can’t easily automate legislative updates and researchers lose a vital stream of structured information.
Currently, with requests trapped in an endless loop and key sign-up offline, even seasoned developers are locked out. And for now, the cause remains unknown. As of Monday afternoon, the Library of Congress had issued no public news release, official statement or a timeline for restoration.
