By Sheeva Azma
Congress.gov is a powerful website with many search options, but in my experience, it can be difficult to navigate if you are new to finding information on the site. Once you figure out how to find stuff, like bills, it can be very powerful. You can use it not only to look at bills that are passed but also to see who has sponsored a bill, and who co-sponsored it, and look up previous bills and do a search in the news to see how likely that bill might be to pass. That can be useful if you work in policy consulting, like me, and your client asks you how likely a bill is to pass…and what it contains.
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I made a video walkthrough of how to use Congress.gov to research pending and approved legislation and you can watch that here. You might want to full-screen the video to be able to see everything on the screen share. Also, note that the dropdown menus did not show up on the screen share, so you’ll want to navigate to congress.gov and try the website out for yourself.
The Library of Congress did a helpful walkthrough of just the website’s features. Their explainer video is a bit more comprehensive, mentioning stuff like the fact that you can sign up for an account and save your searches and even get alerts on various searches.
Here’s their official walkthrough/explainer video. Somehow, the Congress.gov website worked better for them than it did for me…
Congress.gov + C-SPAN are my two main sources for information when I am keeping up with a policy issue being debated in Congress. You can also create an account on C-SPAN and that has a number of helpful features as well.
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That’s all! Drop your questions about using congress.gov (and/or C-SPAN) in the comments. Check out our other blogs here.
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