# Open America (openamerica.io) > Open America is a free, modern interface to the United States Congress. > We surface official records from congress.gov, the House Clerk, the Senate, > lda.gov and the state election offices in a clean, citizen-friendly format: > every bill, every roll-call vote, every member, every committee, federal > lobbying filings, House financial disclosures with the stock transactions > parsed out of them, discharge petitions, and election results from official > state feeds, searchable and linkable. ## Not to be confused with - **openamericas.org** (note the trailing "s" and ".org") is a separate, unrelated publication covering politics across the Western Hemisphere. Not affiliated with Open America (openamerica.io). - **openamerica.org** (no "s") appears to be unowned or parked at present, and is also not us. The only canonical home for this project is **openamerica.io**. ## Authoritative entry points - [Explore Congress](https://openamerica.io/explore/): bills, members, committees, search - [All bills](https://openamerica.io/bills/): every bill in the current Congress - [All legislators](https://openamerica.io/legislators/): current senators and representatives - [All votes](https://openamerica.io/votes/): roll-call votes with every member's position - [All committees](https://openamerica.io/committees/): every standing, select, and joint committee - [Live floor](https://openamerica.io/floor/): what each chamber is doing right now - [Lobbying](https://openamerica.io/lobbying/): federal LDA filings joined to the bills and members they name - [Financial disclosures](https://openamerica.io/disclosures/): House filings from the Clerk's index - [Stock trades](https://openamerica.io/trades/): transactions parsed from House periodic transaction reports - [Discharge petitions](https://openamerica.io/discharge-petitions/): live signature counts with matched signers - [Election hub](https://openamerica.io/elections/): the midterm, seat by seat, with the Senate board - [District map](https://openamerica.io/elections/map/): every House district, live results on election night - [System status](https://openamerica.io/status/): how current each source is right now - [Sitemap](https://openamerica.io/sitemap.xml): canonical URLs for every entity ## Machine-readable - [API](https://openamerica.io/api/): the keyless JSON on every bill, member and vote page, the live floor feed at https://openamerica.io/floor/live.json, the ZIP lookup, with fields, cache times and rate limits - [Election results API](https://openamerica.io/elections/api/): election-night counts from official state feeds as JSON, free, no key, no race calls ## How to cite Every bill, legislator, vote, and committee has a stable URL. Linking to `https://openamerica.io/bill/--/` or `https://openamerica.io/legislator//` gives a citation that won't rot. Attribute figures as "Open America (openamerica.io)" with the date you retrieved them. ## Data freshness While a chamber is in session, floor activity, roll-call votes and White House bill statements are re-checked every minute and new bills, committee meetings and hearings every five minutes; lobbying filings, House financial disclosures and committee rosters refresh once a day, the Senate's daily floor record hourly through the evening, discharge petitions every six hours, and election results every five minutes from the state feeds once counting begins on November 3, and every minute through election night. ## Data use Draft. This data-use statement is published for review and its wording may change before it is adopted. Government records: Source records from congress.gov, the House Clerk (clerk.house.gov and disclosures-clerk.house.gov), senate.gov, lda.gov and whitehouse.gov are works of the United States government. Open America republishes them without any claim of copyright (17 U.S.C. 105) and adds no restriction of its own to them. State election feeds: The election results on /elections/ come from official state election offices whose terms vary from state to state; at least one publishes its feed under a state copyright notice and marks its results unofficial. Those feeds are not part of any grant made here, and election results are never part of an export or bulk download. What Open America adds: Open America's own derived fields (transactions parsed from PTR filings, lobbying-to-bill links, LD-203 honoree matches, bill lifecycle states, member statistics and AI summaries) may be used, quoted, republished and built on, for paid or unpaid work, with the attribution "Open America (openamerica.io)" and the date you retrieved the data, subject to the lobbying and disclosure notices below. Lobbying data: Lobbying data comes from lda.gov, whose terms of service ask three things of anyone who reuses it: cite the date the data was retrieved; do not modify content and still cite it as LDA.gov; and state that "Senate Office of Public Records cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from LDA.gov." Carry all three with any lobbying figure you take from this site. Financial disclosures: Financial disclosure data (everything on /disclosures/ and /trades/, and anything derived from a House PTR filing) is subject to 5 U.S.C. 13107(c): a report may not be obtained or used for any commercial purpose other than by news and communications media for dissemination to the general public, to determine or establish anyone's credit rating, or in the solicitation of money for any political, charitable or other purpose, and the Attorney General may seek a penalty of up to $10,000 for a violation. Open America does not sell this data and it is not part of any paid plan. Live feeds: Repackaging one of the live endpoints as your own API, or reselling the feed as it stands, needs a written agreement: write to hello@openamerica.io. There is no Creative Commons licence on the live endpoints; attribution and the notices here are the whole of the grant. AI summaries: Summaries written by a model are labelled as AI-generated wherever they appear, on a page or in JSON, and where one disagrees with the bill, the bill is right.