GovTrack.us, launched in 2004, (See govtrack.us as it was on Wayback: 15 Jan 2004), was the first website to apply the principles of open data and Web 2.0 to the U.S. Congress. It catalyzed the development of a community of like-minded developers and shaped the data-oriented open government movement that we see today.
GovTrack.us tracks the activities of the United States Congress to help Americans be the best advocates for the issues they care about and to create a more open and accountable government.
We publish the status of federal legislation and voting records, information and statistics about representative and senators in Congress, and news and commentary about Congress.
We’re one of the oldest open government / government transparency websites in the world. This is not a government website.
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Joshua Tauberer is the “grandfather” of the open-data movement for the U.S. Congress and a “data crusader”.
What you can do on GovTrack
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 in our legislator misconduct database and weekly posts on what’s coming up and what just happened in Congress.
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.
Who we are
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.
We pay our operating costs through our advertising revenue (read our ad policy) and crowdfunding (support us on Patreon; see our 2015 project on Kickstarter).
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.
We’re a small organization with two part-time staff members, who are:
 | Joshua Tauberer, president. 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. |
 | Amy West, research & communications manager. 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. |
Joshua Tauberer is a civic hacker,[1] open government activist,[2] entrepreneur, and author. He is the creator and maintainer of the website GovTrack,[1] a portal for information about legislation in Congress, and developer for EveryCRSReport.com,[3] which makes Congressional Research Service Reports available to the public. Tauberer is also the lead developer for Mail-in-a-Box, an Open Source software project for mail server hosting.[4]
Wikipedia: Joshua Tauberer
I am a software engineering manager and civic hacker living in Washington, DC with experience in scientific computing and data analysis, civic and government technology and advocacy, and cybersecurity compliance. I am best known for creating GovTrack.us, the widely used educational website about the U.S. Congress. I am currently the Head of Product Development at LARSA and previously held numerous consulting and co-founder roles related to information technology innovation in government.
Joshua Taberer website. https://joshdata.me/
See also: Marshall Kirkpatrick.”Data Hacker Pageranks Members of the US Congress.” ReadWriteWeb. Dec. 27, 2010.
What’s the fastest way to evaluate the true behavior of a Senator or Representative in Congress? How about through a ready-made mathematical model and some charts? That’s what Josh Tauberer has created as the latest project at congress-tracking site GovTrack.us. (Numerical methods for determining leadership and ideology in Congress)
“Bulk access to legislative information makes large-scale statistical analyses possible,” Tauberer writes. He’s performed analyses he says are like Google’s Pagerank, but for politicians: he’s tracked which politicians vote together in order to discover moderates and extremists, and he’s treated sponsorship and co-sponsorship of legislation like an endorsement of leadership, similar to the way Google treats links between Web pages as an endorsement. The resulting chart, below, tracks Senate members on axis of leadership and ideology. It’s a fascinating way to see important qualitative matters quantified and to get a quick snapshot of politicians you might not follow very closely. Something like this could also be helpful in assessing claims and pushing for accountability of elected officials.
One interesting thing that sticks out to me: Joe Lieberman may be best known for taking conservative positions that drive many of his fellow Democrats crazy – but day in and day out, he votes with them more than a number of other party-mates. As he has said, though: “I agree more often than not with Democrats on domestic policy. I agree more often than not with Republicans on foreign and defense policy.”
This kind of “birds of a feather flock together” statistical analysis reminds me of the fabulous, now-two-year-old project Memeorandum Colors. That Firefox extension used similar math to help color code political blogs for rapid display of their partisan orientation.
I sure hope we’ll see a lot more work like this being done in the future. The instrumentation, or making data-enabled, of a wide variety of experiences in public and private life promises to serve as a foundation for new levels of social and self awareness and the creation of innovative new services.
See also: Owen Poindexter. Budget Proposals Follow Energy Influence: Obama Goes After Producers, Sen. Paul Goes After Regulators. 31 Jan 2011. MAPLight.org – Money and Politics
Jan. 31, 2011 – In the 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed eliminating roughly $4 billion annually in tax deductions to oil companies. Recently elected senator of Kentucky, Republican Rand Paul, has released a budget proposal, which would, among other things, fold the Department of Energy (DOE) into the Department of Defense. The DOE oversees domestic energy production, nuclear materials, and the research and development of energy technologies.
See: Dirty Energy Money
See: U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi: The Gavel: Draining The Swamp
See: Big Money Drives Up the Betting on the Marcellus Shale
See: Opponents to Fracking Disclosure Take Big Money From Industry
See: Smitsky Letter
